TO GIVE A sense of the frenzied feeling that engulfed the Stade Chaban-Delmas on Saturday, there were times where the Munster coaches were unable to hear themselves on their microphones due to the noise being generated by the travelling support, the bulk of whom were seated just in front of the coaching box.

The knock-on effect was that Ian Costello and Co struggled to get some of their messages down to the pitch. On other occasions the coaches had to stand to get a view over the crowd, who were edging up out of their seats as their team chipped away at Bordeaux’s sizeable lead. As the province surged in the second half, that travelling support, estimated at around 2,500, briefly felt another special Munster moment might be brewing. 

Having been completely eviscerated by Bordeaux in the first half, falling 29-3 down on the back of a baffling succession of errors, Munster were clawing their way back into the game. At one point Munster cut Bordeaux’s lead down to 11 with seven minutes to play, only for the French side to pull clear again on the final stretch. 

Ultimately Munster had left themselves with too much to do. At this level, you simply can’t go away to a team like Bordeaux and hand them a head start. 

It was far removed from the dogged and controlled display in La Rochelle seven days previously. Naturally, the temptation was to assume the efforts against Ronan O’Gara’s man took too much out of the tank, but that’s not how Munster felt about things. They came to France for this quarter-final feeling good about themselves, the win in La Rochelle energising their preparations for Bordeaux.

Costello would reveal he feared some mental fatigue being evident on the day, but as it happened he was perfectly happy with how his team pitched up. The application was there, but the execution was critically lacking for too much of this contest. The handling errors were a problem. The nine lost lineouts a killer.

“Genuinely we thought it might be around mental energy and emotionally being at the right pitch. No, it didn’t feel like that at all. It genuinely felt like we just didn’t execute well enough in two areas of our game,” said Costello. 

“You can probably get away with one, put two together and we struggled. And then we needed a big start to the second half and we didn’t get it. We left it a little bit too late.

“[We had to] Keep the ball. It’s the single most important thing against Bordeaux. We had to kick in a certain way. I felt we had a really strong plan going into it but we didn’t execute it.

“So it’s irrelevant when we don’t execute. We turned over ball and we probably needed to react faster in turnover there (given) their ability to handle and they have some serious speed and that hurts but really the thing that I think did the most damage was our accuracy out of touch and our accuracy with our handling.”

Munster captain Tadhg Beirne also refused to use the energy expended in La Rochelle as a reason for their off-colour start, the province watching their hosts run in four first-half tries on the back of Munster errors.

“No. I think it gave us a confidence in our ability and what we can do,” Beirne said.

“We came here knowing it was going to be an unbelievably difficult game and it was going to take a serious performance and a much better performance than the La Rochelle game, and we didn’t do that.

The first half, we will look back at that and be incredibly frustrated because we didn’t turn up like we said we were going to turn up and that’s the part that’s going to be disappointing.”

“We’re going to regret what could have been today, in terms of our performance,” Costello added.

“Very disappointed for that huge support. It was the same last week, last week was special and this was another opportunity in a special competition with such a good following. So very disappointed that we didn’t give them the performance that they deserved.” 

With Europe over for another season the province now go all-in on the URC, a competition they won in 2023 and were then bitterly disappointed to exit in the semi-finals at home to Glasgow last season, missing out on a home final as a result. They don’t want to end that competition with the same regrets this time around.

“We’ve one focus, finish as high up the league as possible, make sure we’re in the play-offs, that’s the first priority,” Costello said.

“We’ve got massive games left. We’ve worked our way up from 13th to fifth and it’s making sure now over the next couple of weeks, the Bulls and Cardiff, we’ve two performances and two results. Unfortunately we don’t have a semi-final, that will give us a chance to take a break and really hit the last couple of games of the season as well.

“The URC is huge for as well, it’s just very disappointing to go out of a competition that we love so much.”

“We’re in a difficult position in the URC as well,” said Byrne.

“We’re in a must-win situation every game until the end of the season. We’ve been here for the last two seasons so we kind of know the feeling and we spoke in there that if we can just bottle up what we were doing in the last 290 minutes; holding onto the ball and playing the way we want to play I think teams will find it difficult to keep up with us.

“That’s what we have to take from this game. We take the positives and we’ll figure out what learnings we have to do as well, but I think we can take a lot of positives from it as well and a new challenge next week in playing the Bulls, so we’ll have to regroup and all focus goes on the URC now… unfortunately!”