Peter O’Mahony details heated contract talk with ex-Munster coach where he was forced to ‘fetch like a dog’

Shocking stuff...

At 34, he had just played in a World Cup quarter-final in October of 2023, and was centrally contracted with the IRFU until the end of the 2023/2024 season.

But O'Mahony, who was made Ireland captain in 2024, knew he had another season in him, and wanted to get the paperwork done.

The IRFU offered to pay a portion of the contract, but Munster would have to pay the rest, and this led to a tough conversation with Munster head coach Graham Rowntree, or 'Wig', which turned sour.

O'Mahony explained: "Wig told me that my body wasn’t good enough to play rugby next season. ‘You’ll thank me for this’, he said. ‘Your body’s broken up.’

"‘You’ll thank me for this next year’, he kept telling me. He might not think I had a young man’s body any more, but he was speaking to me like I was a child.

"I asked him what his evaluation of my body was based on. He said, ‘I see the way you come in in the morning. Mondays and Tuesdays, you’re very stiff.’

"‘I’m not f**king 20 years old’, I told him. ‘I get stiff after a game. That’s normal enough, like.’

"Wig was looking at me. We’d been back and forth for 45 minutes. He kept looking at me.

"He had a pen in his hand. I could see that a thought had entered his mind. Suddenly he f**ked the pen across the floor of his office. I looked at him.

"He said, ‘Go on over and pick the pen up. Show me how stiff you are.’

"I’m like, ‘You’re f**king joking me.’

"Immediately he said, ‘Forget about that, that was a joke. You’ve read it wrong.’

"I’ve spent my adult life at the club, I said to myself, and this is what it’s come down to now: Wig throwing a pen across the floor for me to fetch like a f**king dog.

"I smiled to myself and got up. The meeting had ended. I knew this day was coming, I knew, as every professional knows, that the end will not necessarily be pleasant, but I couldn’t have imagined it would be handled like this.

"This is business, I told myself afterwards. It’s just f**king business. But I thought it was bad business."

O'Mahony would go on to play for Ireland in the 2025 Six Nations, before announcing his retirement from international rugby, and would retire from Munster at the end of that season.

Rowntree abruptly left his role at head coach with Munster in October of 2024, following a poor run of results.

This is not the first time a veteran Munster icon has spoken out against Rowntree in a book.

Conor Murray - stepped down from Munster at the same time as O'Mahony - was highly critical of the Englishman in his book, ‘Cloud Nine: My Life in Rugby’.

He wrote: "“I didn’t rate Graham Rowntree at all,” the former Ireland and British & Irish Lions star said in his book, with the extract published by the Irish Independent.

“And, in his last season, even the younger players were starting to see through him.

“Personally, I didn’t see a lot of rugby knowledge there.

“I won’t be two-faced here and say I was sorry to see him go. In all honesty, I wasn’t.

“I will let other players speak for themselves, but the way he’d spoken to myself and one or two of my close friends in the squad was, at times, unacceptable.”