MUNSTER’S TWO-POINT defeat to Northampton Saints was nowhere near the more troubling end of the province’s performances this season, but post-game the mood from the Munster camp was notably downbeat.

The visitors played their part in a gripping battle at Franklin’s Gardens yesterday, crossing for four tries through Calvin Nash and Diarmuid Kilgallen, but ultimately paid the price for some costly lapses of discipline and a litter of unforced errors.

The end result is that Munster will be on the road in the round of 16 and while the performances against Saracens and Northampton over the last two weekends might suggest a squad making slow, steady progress, the swings in terms of performance are proving a real point of frustration within the camp.

“When we’re good, I think we’re very good. The problem is when we’re poor we’re being very poor,” was Munster captain Tadhg Beirne’s succinct summation.

“We need to be very good for a lot longer periods in the game and that’s the frustrating thing. There’s belief in this group with what we can do, it’s about putting the foot down and doing it, ideally for 80 minutes. We’ll be hard to live with when we do do that.

“I think we showed snippets of that in today’s game. To still concede five tries, it’s pretty disappointing. What might look like a really good try to the average supporter, we’re looking at that as a terrible try to concede in terms of our systems. That’s the stuff that we’ll be frustrated with.”  

Beirne singled out Munster’s discipline as a sore point. Northampton scored two tries either side of half-time while Gavin Coombes sat in the sin bin, while Munster also coughed up some sloppy penalties across the game.

“Discipline probably let us down a little bit again, and then we had a lot of dropped balls as well,” Beirne said.

“We came here to play and I think we gave it a good crack and I’m guessing it was probably a good game to watch in terms of the scores and that.

“But you know, I’ve got to give credit to the lads, we left it all out there but in terms of the performance itself, there’s probably a lot of things that we’ll be able to look back on and say we could have done a lot better.

“Whenever you get a yellow card it’s how you manage it and unfortunately they scored right when we were about to get Coombesy back on, they sucked us in and beat us out wide and credit to them. It was just error on error to let them inside our 22 so that’s the stuff that probably kills you in the end.

“But you’ve got to give credit to Northampton, they played well and they took advantage of that extra man and scored 12 points I think in that period, that’s the winning of the game really.”