Battle-hardened KO kings Munster aim to march on Pretoria

They’ve flown to Durban to play the Hollywoodbets Sharks in Saturday’s Vodacom URC quarterfinal but the mood coming out of the Munster camp is that their South African trip won’t be ending in Durban but proceeding to Pretoria.

It might seem a bit insulting to Edinburgh, who face the Vodacom Bulls in the earlier semifinal on South African soil on Saturday, but the widespread expectation appears to be that the Bulls will avenge their recent EPCR Challenge Cup quarterfinal defeat in Edinburgh by winning their first knockout game to set up a Loftus semifinal.

And although Munster had to dig deep to make the URC top eight, with their main motivation being the preservation of their all important Investec Champions Cup status, they have come here with every intention of beating the Springbok-laden Sharks to secure a playoff game at a venue where they won in league play last season.

The message put out to the Irish rugby media this week was that Munster don’t consider the Hollywoodbets Kings Park game a free pass - meaning that they don’t see the success of their backs to the wall drive to recover from a parlous position and make the top eight as a mission accomplished.

They want more, and they want to get at the very least to a Loftus semifinal.

VISITORS HAVE HAD MORE THAN JUST CHANGE OF COACH

Munster’s interim head coach Ian Costello was installed in his position ironically enough after Munster came well short (they lost 41-24) when they visited Durban in league play last October.

The 2023 URC winning coach Graham Rowntree made his exit a few days later, but Costello doesn’t reckon the change of mentor is the only thing that has changed for Munster over the past six months.

“I think the squad is in a different place (to where it was then),” Costello was quoted as saying in the Irish media.

“If you look at the squad that actually travelled over here, you see a huge difference between the squad that travelled over in October versus the squad that’s over here this week. It feels like there’s an awful lot more experience, guys really hitting their form. It is really competitive. We’ve also had two weeks (since the end of the league phase) and that really helps.”

The end of the league season was certainly a stressful time for Munster and that’s why Costello’s claim that his team is in a very different space now to where they were in October should be taken seriously.

Munster have effectively been doing what they did in 2023, when they were out of contention and then won a string of league games that amounted to knockout fixtures to grab fifth spot on the log and then win the competition by prevailing in three away playoff games.

BEEN ON KNOCKOUT FOOTING FOR A WHILE

Winning in Glasgow, Dublin and then Cape Town wasn’t the complete summary of Munster’s legendary triumph back then - they also prevailed in key games on South African soil, with their win over the Stormers in the league phase and then a come from behind draw with the Sharks in Durban making sure of their top eight finish.

That was already an achievement in itself, but the Munster class of 2023 didn’t see it that way and Costello intimated that the current squad has the same attitude after they had to win tough games in consecutive weeks against Ulster and Benetton, who’d thumped Glasgow the week before, just to get into the playoffs and qualify for their Champions Cup.

“We absolutely don’t see this game as a free shot,” he said.

“There is an expectation we need to be in knockout rugby and there was a lot of pressure around that. But now that we are here, we are very, very ambitious on what we want to achieve. We all know that we (simply) had to get into the playoffs. We had to get into the Champions Cup, because that is an expectation of Munster and rightly so.

“I think it was very important that we drew a line under that first. We put an awful lot into that (getting into the playoffs and the Champions Cup qualification) physically, mentally and emotionally in the last two weeks (of league play)…

“This group, over the past couple of weeks, have really shown how much they care about each other. It came out in the way we trained, prepared, what we would have seen behind closed doors and what you (the media and outside world) would have seen in our performances. You don’t get the intensity and physicality of a performance like that unless there is a real deep care and it means a huge amount to the group.

“I think that was huge to get the job done, but we’ve had a taste of playoffs before, we’ve played a few knock-outs already this year, more than we would have liked. That’s set us up to have a real crack at it this week, so it’s a fresh focus and we’re just really excited about playoff rugby.”

AIMING TO ATONE FOR LAST SEASON’S DEFLATION

If Munster do have a score to settle it won’t be aimed at the Sharks and what happened in Durban in October, but aimed at making up for last year’s abject disappointment of making a semifinal exit to eventual champions Glasgow Warriors after they’d put themselves in the pound seats by topping the log.

Certainly Munster did everything the more conventional way last year than they did on the way to winning the championship the season before that, with their top placed finish signifying that they were the most consistent team in the competition.

The year before that they were well off the pace and won in adversity, with perhaps a little bit of pressure off, whereas last year they set themselves up and took on the pressure that comes with a home run in the playoffs and fluffed it.

They are back now on what the late former Bok World Cup-winning coach Kitch Christie referred to in 1995 as the low road, meaning they have to do it the hard way.

Maybe that makes them more dangerous, so the Sharks should be forewarned.

And perhaps the Bulls too.