Munster too often dwarfed by legacy of the jersey as they slide into tortured mediocrity

For everybody with feelings for Munster, there is an image of the club they refuse to give up. It is romantic and rooted in the past and, somehow, it has survived Munster’s descent into tortured mediocrity. It is not blind adoration, but it is heartfelt.In his new autobiography and in interviews promoting the book, Peter O’Mahony has not spared the Munster leadership for what he perceives to be years of mismanagement. He was wounded by Munster’s disrespectful vacillating over his final contract extension, and it troubled him that in 10 years as captain he lifted just one trophy. But he never renounced his original feelings for the jersey.“There’s always something different, though [about Munster],” he said in conversation a couple of weeks ago. “Whatever happens it will be a special club. We travel anywhere in Europe, and you’ll get bigger crowds because we’re there. It’s a really critical time now that Munster hold on to that and realise how important it is.”But is that not living in the past, I asked him?READ MORE“Yeah, well,” he said, “you have to build yourself on something.”[ Peter O’Mahony: ‘There was stuff that I shouldn’t have done – the pressure I was putting on people’Opens in new window ]Munster’s history, though, is never entirely in the past. There always seems to be an upcoming anniversary of some event from the glory days. Munster rarely play a European game that doesn’t have an historical resonance of some kind. Creamy pints of nostalgia are filled from a pouring tap. “We know the history,” said Ian Flanagan, the outgoing chief executive, in an interview with Simon Lewis in May. “We know what we want to live up to.”That fixed standard, though, has magnified every shortcoming over the last 15 years. When was the last time Munster had a team that could remotely live up to the overbearing achievements of the teams that set the standard? When was the last time a Munster team didn’t feel dwarfed by the legacy of the jersey? “Things have deteriorated and the notion that Munster ‘aren’t far away’ comes off as a little fanciful now. Frankly, I don’t remember Munster as low,” wrote Ronan O’Gara in his Irish Examiner column towards the end of last season. “Just because Munster are a big brand does not mean that the brand can’t fail.”Munster's Billy Holland and JJ Hanrahan after losing to Toulouse in 2021. Photograph: Dan Sheridan/Inpho The resignation of Flanagan as chief executive last week, before the publication of an independent review into the governance of Munster Rugby, has promoted the possibility of another “line in the sand”. It is a familiar chorus. The problem for Munster is that Ground Zero has kept shifting. It is 10 years since Alan Quinlan’s famous outburst on Sky Sports after Munster lost to Stade Français by 20 points in Paris, even though the French team had played for 40 minutes with just 14 men. Only a try by Conor Murray with five minutes left prevented Munster from suffering their first shutout in 21 years of European rugby up to that point. “Embarrassing, humiliating, disgraceful – these are the words that spring to mind,” said Quinlan in the live broadcast. That season Munster failed to qualify from the pool stages of the Champions Cup for the second year in a row and didn’t reach the play-off stages of the Pro12, as it was then. The bracing thing, though, is to compare that team to the current squad: the starting 15 against Stade Français contained nine players capped by Ireland and four players who had toured with the British and Irish Lions. Nothing like such depth exists now. When Munster lost by 31 points to the Bulls in the quarter-final of the URC last season, only four of the starting 15 had ever been capped by Ireland and they had made just 63 appearances between them – 31 of which belonged to Craig Casey. None of the Munster players had toured with the British and Irish Lions. [ United Rugby Championship: Munster 26 Bulls 22Opens in new window ]In these things despair is always relative to expectation. Our memories are short too. It is only five years since, in the space of a week, Munster lost the final of the Pro14 to Leinster and ran Toulouse to seven points in the Champions Cup in Thomond Park. Both defeats were held up as harrowing examples of how far Munster had fallen off the pace at the elite level of the club game. How would a week like that be received now? The context for such despair at the time was hope. At the beginning of that season Damien De Allende and RG Snyman, World Cup winners with South Africa, had arrived on massive contracts. It was seen as a demonstration of Munster’s renewed ambition. Munster's Robin Copeland dejected after Stade Français loss in 2016. Photograph: Dan Sheridan/Inpho Trophy signings are off the menu now. Last season ended with a round of redundancies and further cuts to the playing budget. At the end of June, Munster announced a €1 million cash flow deficit in their 2024-25 accounts, which they expected would be repeated in last season’s accounts. In his autobiography, Conor Murray wrote bluntly about the cost-cutting that had impacted on the first team and dragged the club into a swamp.“Travelling on the cheap has become an issue in the last few seasons,” he wrote about an away trip to Zebre in September 2024. “It’s another manifestation of the ongoing financial spiral. They don’t buy big-time players because they’ll cost too much so you end up with fewer box office talents who’ll get supporters coming through the turnstiles. “Your squad becomes progressively weaker season upon season and inevitably, then, the results start to suffer. That in turn affects the gate receipts which in turn means the quality of the recruitment goes down and the vicious circle continues. An air of stagnation starts to hang over everything. And eventually you end up sending your squad cattle class to Italy and the Munster brand name takes another embarrassing hit to its prestige.”Zebre won that game, their first victory over Munster in 21 attempts. [ Owen Doyle: World Rugby must tackle laissez-faire policy spreading like a virus in southern hemisphereOpens in new window ]The feelings that surround the club now are estranged from hope. The crowds at home games have boiled down to the hard core. Tickets for the glamorous Champions Cup game against Racing 92 in Páirc Uí Chaoimh on Saturday, October 17th, are not selling fast. Filling Thomond Park for any European game now is a relic of another era. A change of leadership at the top of the organisation is desperately needed but there are no miracle cures. Munster have been digging this hole for years. “The past is a foreign country,” wrote LP Hartley. “They do things differently there.”