There’s nothing like a good scrap to clear the air.
The rugby term is ‘a good blow-out’. It stands for many things – getting the lungs burning, feeling that searing pain of contact, stretching the legs, boxing the heads off each other.
Nothing quite as serious as a full-blown brawl at the University of Limerick Arena but it certainly got heated.
Rugby writer Declan Rooney was in U.L for Munster’s midweek media duties and caught some of their full-contact training session. Tempers became frayed, he reports, and ‘on one occasion a couple of players had to be separated by their team-mates’.
Asked about the blow-out, Munster director of rugby Rassie Erasmus said:
“I think that [frustration] is what showed a little bit today, but it was nothing too serious. I think that’s competitiveness, but it’s frustration too.”
To most of the 7,405 fans that endured Munster’s 24-23 loss to Cardiff at Musgrave Park, last Friday, they will be heartened to hear the players are just as pissed off as them. Ever since the turn of the century, Munster live, breed and bleed for victories.
Munster are right up against it this season. Finishing sixth in last season’s Guinness PRO12 has given them a nightmare of a Champions Cup group. They are introducing foreign recruits without huge Test pedigree and filtering them into an injury-ravaged squad with a new coaching staff and a lot of greenhorns.
Spirit alone won’t get Munster through the worst of it but it will certainly help. It was a major part of their excellent, dogged away win over Scarlets on the opening day of the season.
Knocking each other’s blocks off is not something this burgeoning yet brittle Munster squad should ascribe to but it helps clear the air every now and then.
Some of Munster and Ireland’s best teams contained players that hated each other’s guts or, more often, got on each other’s wick from time to time.
Erasmus and his coaching staff would not have been too perturbed by the antics at U.L on Wednesday. They will be, though, if all that bile and bluster is not brought to bear on Newport Gwent Dragons this weekend.
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