IT’S AN INTERESTING time at Munster, with new faces – some more familiar than others – settling in at the province ahead of the new United Rugby Championship season, which gets underway this weekend.
Graham Rowntree has stepped up to the position of head coach, replacing Johann van Graan, with former Munster players Denis Leamy, Mike Prendergast and Andi Kyriacou all on board as coaches. Throw in new signings such as Malakai Fekitoa and Antoine Frisch, and you have plenty of new energy added to the group.
Yesterday’s training session at UL was briefly interrupted for another introduction, as Garth Brooks made an unexpected visit to the campus ahead of his second round of sold-out concerts in Croke Park this weekend.
“I didn’t actually shake hands with him, but I was within about 10 metres of him,” explains Leamy, Munster’s new defence coach.
“Garth just showed up out of the blue. We were doing an indoor prep session, we were doing a little bit of mauling. So, he arrived with his camera crew and a few of his people and he arrived into the middle of it. It was quite bizarre really.
Well, that was unexpected! 🤠
— Munster Rugby (@Munsterrugby) September 13, 2022
Great to meet @garthbrooks during our session @UL today 🤩🎤#GARTHinIreland#SUAF 🔴 pic.twitter.com/aCI2UP01im
“It was great. It was really good. He’d a bit of chat with a few of the boys and we stopped the session, couple of photos and away we went. He was very engaging. I think he’d a lot of fans (within the squad), a lot of fans. I think Chris Farrell was swooning over him a little bit.”
Leamy himself has no shortage of fans around Munster, who managed to entice him away from a comfortable environment at Leinster over the summer. The former Munster and Ireland flanker admitted he thought “long and hard” about his options before putting pen to paper with his home province, who are embarking on another new chapter following Van Graan’s drawn-out exit last season.
Rowntree has assembled a coaching ticket which will enjoy instant support from the Munster faithful. The hope now is that they can finally take the next step in their development and seriously challenge for silverware again.
Yet having spent a couple of months getting his hands dirty around his old stomping ground, Leamy stresses this latest Munster set-up will require patience from supporters.
“This isn’t dressing it up or down, but the big thing is getting genuinely good performances out of the group of players that we have,” he continues.
“There’s expectations from fans, pressure from outside but the big thing for us is to be as good as we can be.
Talk of silverware, talk of anything like that; we need to be careful. It’s not a lack of ambition, anything like that, it’s a young group with a good group of coaches, all still finding each other and without asking for too much time to be bought the important thing is that we’re growing, we’re developing as a group and we’re getting to a place where we can win in tough places.
“And it’s going to take time. I don’t believe that this is a quick fix or a silver bullet, it’s a work in progress, day to day we’re on the pitch, we’re trying to train an awful lot differently to what I’m hearing we did before. We’re trying to change habits and stuff like that.
“Listen, that doesn’t happen in a week or two or a month, it takes five, six, seven months and there’ll be ups and downs along the way, and that’s going to be part of the ride, I believe.
“So being patient is a big, big thing and look, we’ll know a lot by January, February in terms of where we are at but it is definitely a work in progress.”
The Munster via Leinster path is not one many coaches travel, but the two-time Heineken Cup winner explains that his time in Dublin was hugely beneficial in terms of his own development as a coach. Munster aren’t just getting a hometown hero back on the books – they’re getting a coach who has spent time working closely with some the top operators in European rugby over the last few years.
“It’s been an unbelievable experience in terms of learning,” Leamy says of his time with Munster’s fierce rivals.
“There’s no doubt about it, even the hardest Munster supporters (know that) Leinster are high class and the people are high class, and in the building there’s expertise in every corner and it was an amazing experience, just to rub shoulders with the likes of Leo Cullen and Stuart Lancaster, Felipe Contepomi and Robyn McBride.
You take something from every one of them. There’s just a huge amount of rugby knowledge in that group and how they go about their business, how they teach players and how they coach players, how they put in place practices to get better and better and better and how the micro detail is focused on and dissected and worked on, it’s just hugely impressive.
“Look, there’s no doubt I have learned a huge amount in Leinster. A huge amount. An awful lot of my beliefs in rugby are probably shaped by the people I met up there.”
Of course, Leinster isn’t Munster. The two clubs have two distinctly different identities, which they both lean proudly into. Rowntree has previously spoken strongly about the importance of the ‘Munster DNA’, and part of Leamy’s brief will surely involve stressing that sense of identity to the current group.
“There’s no doubt about it, we have a unique DNA and unique mindset and that comes out in Munster people all the time,” he adds.
“Just being back here, straightaway you know it’s different, you know the people are different and what works in Leinster doesn’t necessarily work in Munster and I think that’s what being a coach is, is understanding what can work here and what doesn’t work and dissecting.
“So taking one game plan from Leinster and trying to put it into Munster, that’s never going to work. That’s fools gold. I suppose I’ll lean on my experiences and my understanding of being here as a player, growing up here. I was 16 when I first played for a Munster team, a Munster schools team. I was 19 when I played for the senior team.
“I was exposed to a lot of what was really, really good about Munster through the Noughties and I think there’s loads and loads for us there to lean on and to develop and to flesh out.
“There’s great values in this province and we’ll go back to them, but we need to develop the skills of the modern game in terms of catch pass, tackle technique, breakdown work. We need to be really good in those areas as well.”
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