There is still plenty to play for this season.
Losing a European Cup semi-final is always going to hurt.
If you told Munster fans at the beginning of the season that their side would be contesting a home semi-final in the Champions Cup then they would have questioned your mental state.
When the players were greeted with a sea of red and a wall of noise as they took to the pitch in the Aviva Stadium, it was a beautiful reminder of what this team and what its fans are capable of.
The roar was the kind that hasn’t been heard in many years.
This young group of players now have a taste for that and it can only fuel their desire to take the next step in their development.
This wasn’t like the some of the heartbreaking semi-final defeats during Munster’s quest for the holy grail.
There was no ‘hand of Back’ incident like in 2002 against Leicester.
There was no conceding a last-minute try like with Trevor Leota for Wasps in 2004.
Munster were just beaten by a superior outfit.
However, they can take heart from how they rattled the English and European champions for the opening half of this game.
And most importantly, the fans need to realise that this team is young it its development, and they can only get better.
Niall Scannell spoke to SportsJOE in the confines of the Aviva Stadium after the defeat and he was in awe of the support his team received.
“The bus journey in was spine-tingling with the fans and I’ve never had that before. You’ve heard about these great European days you know? And I was involved last year and some of them weren’t so great and that was our own doing, we weren’t getting the results, we weren’t giving the fans the performances.”
Scannell was so thankful for the support when you consider how the fans have filled venues consistently throughout this season – be it Cork, Limerick or their away allocations throughout Ireland, the UK and France.
It isn’t lost on Scannell, and he says that he and his teammates are adamant to do their best for the fans by securing silverware in the PRO12.
“They filled our national stadium today, they got on the road, they paid their money and it’s shame we couldn’t give them a result but I hope they can see we’re trying to leave it all out there for them and they’ve just been unbelievable for the last few weeks. Hopefully, if they can keep behind us and drive us on now it would be brilliant, to give them something back in the PRO12.
This defeat is going to sting for a while.
But this young team can use this pain as motivation to achieve greater things, like the sides of 2006 and 2008 did before them.
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