MUNSTER HEAD COACH Anthony Foley said he was ‘disappointed’ with the Thomond Park crowd for the derision that greeted the withdrawal of Ian Keatley during Saturday’s Champions Cup loss to Leicester.
However, Foley was also at a loss to explain Keatley’s first-half missed penalty that looked set to edge the hosts into a 9 -6 lead.
Instead, the kick went left and Leicester hit the front with a try from Vereniki Goneva.
“Everyone is giving us the points,” Foley said of the 31st minute penalty in front of the posts and directly after Leicester had pulled level.
“There is a massive shift in the game. Everyone is giving us the points, jog back and thinking, ‘next job.’ And suddenly it’s missed and you need to reassess and get back on with it.
“And obviously another incident happened after that (explained in full here) and then we had the overthrow on the line-out and that is the hardest part of it, you know.”
Foley shrugged off the suggestion that the 19 – 31 home defeat could be attributed to a lack of leadership in the team, pointing instead to individual errors when attempting to do the right thing.
You look at the game, we were creating opportunities, we were playing the game in the right areas of the pitch, we were making mistakes in the 22. It was down to fellas trying to do stuff which you want to encourage. It wasn’t fellas looking around, having a scratch, it was fellas trying their hardest and ending up with errors and that’s annoying.
“Did we have good leaders out there? Yes, we did and we controlled a lot of aspects of the game and we put ourselves into position to get back within touching distance as we did in the second-half, but unfortunately we didn’t again build on that.”
After hearing the ironic cheers that flowed from the stands at the signal that Keatley was being replaced by Rory Scannell, Foley bristled at the supporters, saying: ”That is very disappointing from a very knowledgeable crowd to do that.”
And the legendary number eight soon found himself dealing with an element of ‘what ifs’ as it was suggested that most in Munster would have liked to see JJ Hanrahan take over the number 10 jersey under his watch.
Keatley had always dealt well with the competition of Hanrahan when both were vying for a starting slot. However, with many speculating that the solution for Ian Madigan’s game-time problem would be a move to Munster, Foley suggested that Keatley may have been unsettled by the rumours surrounding his position.
“We offered JJ a contract. JJ opted to go to Northampton, that’s his decision, that’s fine, everybody has the right of choice. The Madigan thing is… like that (news story) came from Dublin. Nobody in Munster has spoken to Madigan or attempted to speak to Madigan. That can be unsettling for a player, particularly in the week of a big game whether it is the Leinster player or the Munster player holding the jersey.
Asked to clarify whether he felt Keatley had been unsettled by the talk of Madigan moving south, Foley added:
“I have no idea. I didn’t speak to the lad all week about it – because I had nothing to say to him about it. Sometimes there is stuff happens well outside your control and that was one of them. We are all professionals and we all had jobs to do, it was a busy week.
“I sat down with him during the week and we spoke rugby and we spoke about how to go about the game, how to play it against Leicester and make sure what we were looking for in the game would happen.
“The vast majority of that did happen, but at times it was down to a lack of execution at the back end of it.”
