YOU’RE ONLY AS good as you’re last game, the cliché goes.
For Connacht, their last competitive outing was like a cruel summation of their entire season; an immensely entertaining emotional roller-coaster that sapped every last ounce of strength and hope from them.
Both John Muldoon and prop Denis Buckley played 100 minutes of the heart-stopping, season-ending, extra-time defeat to Gloucester in Kingsholm. So who better to tell The42 how that arduous experience colours their view of the campaign ahead.
“Even though it was a horrible result to take it was actually a really enjoyable game,” says Buckley, “because it was open and fast with both sides trying to play good rugby. In the end we didn’t get over the finish line and that cost us a place in the Champions Cup this year.”
For Muldoon, the sentiment is the same: ”After 10 minutes you pick up your phone and you’re getting messages going ‘game of the year’, best game I’ve seen in ages’ all this. But ultimately you’re sitting down and absolutely shattered. It was a particularly warm day, so you’re dehydrated, shattered and come away losing.”
After the shattering, comes the picking up of pieces. Trying to figure out where it all went wrong. A kick here, a penalty there… it doesn’t matter now in the confines of a single match from three months ago. However, the Connacht forwards are keen on keeping the memory of that game alive, applied to the challenges ahead so that they don’t find themselves empty handed after giving everything at the end of this campaign.
“The whole squad took it badly,” says the loosehead prop, “but you have to take the learnings from that and use what you’re feeling in the dressing room after it to build on for this season. We use that to hopefully get over the line this year.
“You see at the end of the season just how crucial these points are. Games we drew that we should have won, games that got away from us that maybe we should have closed out or maybe a bonus point we should have got or a narrow loss in a game we should have been in control of.
“Then you at the end of the season two or three points literally is the difference between playing in the Champions Cup and the Challenge Cup.
“We can look at a few different things, but hopefully as a squad we’ll be a year older, a year more mature and hopefully we can go one step further this year.
The 25-year-old adds: “The squad we have here and the management, it’s a massively ambitious group. That’s driven from the top down, but also from the bottom up. The players young and old know where we want to go.”
‘Don’t tip the apple cart…’
While the ever-improving ranks are swelling with experience, the backroom staff at the Sportsground has lost the long-standing voice of Dan McFarland after the Glasgow Warriors came calling. Promoting from within is certainly en vogue for Irish provinces in recent seasons and Jimmy Duffy perfectly fitted that bracket for the Westerners.
Muldoon will remain as the on-field leader for the pack, but off the field he expects similar actions with a different approach from the former Player Development Officer.
“Jimmy’s a smart man and he knows Dan had done quite a lot of good work. You don’t tip up the apple cart and start throwing pears in,” says the captain.
“It’s a case of building on top of what you’ve got and adding your tweaks and the stuff you need to do. It’s a case of picking out things you think you can improve, picking bits that Dan didn’t focus on and make sure to drive things Dan was hot on while putting his own stamp on it as well.
“From my point of view, I think the most [noticeable change] will be the difference in character: how he approaches and delivers stuff would be a lot different to Dan.
“He probably meets the players in smaller groups where Dan would take bigger groups whereas Jimmy might meet us on an individual basis. He seems to be a lot more positive than Dan and sure everyone’s different,” the flanker adds with a laugh, “everyone has their own way of presenting and doing stuff.
“It’s been very positive. Everyone’s enjoying it. It’s been good. A lot of us were sad to see Dan go, but at the same time he needed a new challenge and I’ve no doubt he’ll do very well over in Glasgow.”
There are fresh voices and outlooks added among the playing ranks too. Api Pewhairangi, Ben Marshall and Nepia Fox-Matamua arrive from near (in Marshall’s case) and far (for the two Kiwis) to give a little added depth to Pat Lam’s squad. That depth, it is hoped, will enable them to continue their dazzling attacking structures on a consistent basis.
It’s the defence that Muldoon wants to see a concentrated focus on. And that facet requires a little more grit and sometimes some downright unpleasantness to get right. It’s not easy getting a team to be Mr Hyde without the ball and a flamboyant Dr Jekyll with it.
We play an attractive brand of rugby and we’ve got to get the balance right. We’ve got to figure out when to calm things down a bit, when to be that little bit more ruthless, a little bit stronger with the ball and not give away possession as much.
“When you review through the year and see what you’ve done, we probably allowed a few too many soft tries and there’s certain aspects of the game we want to pick up this year and not be as easy. If we can keep our attack game the way it was and be a little bit harder on each other in defence that will help a lot.
“We scored tries against some of the tougher defences in the league, we’ve got to make sure we don’t give away the soft scores, be a bit harder on ourselves and hopefully that will add a bit to us as the season goes on.”
