In any big game, you look for little moments that “set the tone”.
These are the moments that, in hindsight, point you in the direction of the eventual winner. A carry here, maybe a tackle there. A lineout won. Or stolen. A scrum penalty. There’s always one moment that stands out like a beacon – this is where we won and they lost.
When you go looking for those moments in this particular game, you find them literally everywhere. But they are not the moment.
O’Connell and O’Callaghan driving Chabal back, for example.
Now this was a totemic moment. Sale’s biggest player – their talisman – isolated under a high ball and smashed backwards. But it wasn’t the moment.
Was it Anthony Foley and O’Gara putting a shot on Chabal (there’s that man again) a few minutes later?
It’s up there. O’Gara makes the low stop while Axel adds the exclamation mark to finish. There is Sale’s talisman again, suitably hammered. The man who thought he came to Limerick to be the hammer winds up being the nail. Not the first, won’t be the last, but as moments go in this game was it the moment?
I don’t think so, no.
I think this was the moment.
When opposing teams come to Thomond Park, they armour themselves in the stories they tell each other during the week leading to the game.
“We’re going to be the ones to beat Munster there.”
“It’s just like any other game. Stick to your game and you’ll beat them.”
“Man for man, we’re better than them. We battered them at our place.”
“It’s just a stadium.”
They cover themselves in this armour to stop the demons of Thomond Park from seeping in and wrapping their tendrils around your innards. The armour is supposed to stop those demons from dragging you out of the game. When you’re “in” the game, you don’t really think about what you’re doing. You flow. When you’re taken out of the game you begin to realise that you’re on a rugby field, and you’re cold, and you’re hurt, and thousands of people are watching you and everything starts to be harder.
In the 24th minute, you could see Sale – then top of the Premiership and on course to finish their European pool with the highest amount of points anyone had ever won up until that point – collectively realise that all the words they’d told themselves during the week were all lies.
Sale demolished Munster on the first day of the pool in Edgeley Park but this?
This was something different. You could see Sale letting Thomond Park in as the Fields of Athenry enveloped the old ground. Seasoned, top-end internationals that would go on to be champions of England later that year had the look of a group of guys that just realised they weren’t in any old ground. They had wandered into the mouth of hell itself and all the stories they told themselves in the week leading to the game had been just that, stories.
And that would be that.
***
When we get away from the moments of who broke when and where we can get into the detail of how Munster built this win.
Munster were obviously wired for this game and that showed in some of the early collisions on both sides of the ball but that alone wouldn’t be enough to get the job done against a pretty intimidating Sale lineup.
We can look back at this game fourteen years later and it can almost seem like an inevitability. Of course Munster were going to win! But that was far from a guarantee at the time because of the quality of the opposition.
Sale Sharks were stacked in 2006. They had Jason Robinson, Mark Cueto, Ignacio Fernadez Lobbe (older brother of Juan Martín), Andrew Sheridan, Chris Jones, Magnus Lund, Jason White, Charlie Hodgson and, the jewel in the crown, their rampaging #8 Sébastien Chabal. They had so many top class internationals and were physically massive. Jason White, Chabal, Lund, Fernandez Lobbe, Jones, Sheridan were all huge men and internationals at the time and their backline had elusive, world class talent in Robinson and Cueto, an experienced and hard-hitting midfield duo along with a resurgent Charlie Hodgson at #10.
They would walk the Premiership this season and they were rightly confident that they could go to Thomond Park and do what, at that stage, nobody had done – beat Munster in Limerick in the European Cup.
We would have known that enduring too much Sale possession in this game would be a recipe for a loss. Sale Sharks were used to hanging onto the ball for long periods, smashing you off #9 with their heavy runners and then getting the ball to finishers like Cueto and Robinson. They had a massive scrum and, at the time, one of the most dangerous #8s playing the game to launch off it so Munster’s margin for error was quite small here.
Thomond Park would give Munster a lift but it wouldn’t be enough on its own. For me, the win was founded on stuffing Sale at the set piece, moving the lines on transition and kicking incredibly smartly.
In some cases, those moments of transition combined with smart kicking would be combined to be doubly effective.
Here’s an example of John Kelly drilling a kick down the line in transition for a massive territorial gain right before the Fields of Athenry moment.
From that lineout, but O’Callaghan (one of the premier front jumpers in the game at the time) got up ahead of White and made the clean turnover.
This tactic was not without risk – Sale demonstrated what they could do off the lineout in the first half and made great gains off both.
What you want to watch here is the second phase swarm coming around the corner after Sevealii’s crash ball.
This was where Sale were most dangerous. That second phase charge from White, Bruno and Chabal with Sheridan coming behind was a recipe for automatic gainline success. We couldn’t afford to give up too many of those.
We would have stuff their maul builds…
… and then strike quickly in transition when we managed to interrupt their possession off the lineout.
Essentially, we would use O’Gara (and others) to give Sale lineout possession and then look to attack Bruno’s throw to force turnovers that we could use to attack the Sharks on transition at best or disrupt their flow of possession at a bare minimum.
We were helped by having two of the best counter-jumpers in the game at the time in O’Connell and O’Callaghan. They were explosive jumpers with big, powerful wingspans and once they started to disrupt Bruno, the Sale hooker, the Sharks lineout started to wobble at key moments.
We were putting them under pressure in the right areas of the field with accurate, varied kicking strategies that consistently moved the lines. We were rewarded with good transition possession and excellent field position. Essentially, we got rid of the ball in areas we didn’t really want to play in and got it back in transition, in a lineout of our own or with advanced field position and possession.
You don’t get the field position without accurate, advanced kicking and that’s exactly what we got from our backline.
But this doesn’t just happen.
It was built on a key part of this Munster side – the passing range of Peter Stringer and the accuracy and decision making of Ronan O’Gara.
By this point, most teams had worked out that O’Gara standing on his own wasn’t much of a ball carrying threat. O’Gara could certainly carry the ball in certain circumstances, but he wasn’t going to break the line straight off the pass in most circumstances.
But with a forward hanging off his inside shoulder and running a dummy track line, Munster could build in a carrying threat in the #10 channel that every opponent had to respect.
So, with the inside held on the #10 channel, Munster had access to a lot of space on the outside channels that O’Gara’s wide range of passing and kicking options could regularly find. That meant defences had to make decisions early and O’Gara was a master at ensuring they picked the wrong one.
The speed and accuracy of Stringer’s pass meant that O’Gara was often outside the point of the Sale defence before they had a chance to react.
Stringer’s pass in the above GIF travelled roughly 20m at an unbelievable pace.
So O’Gara was always moving ahead of the Sale defence and, with Halstead outside of him, O’Gara had a potent physical weapon to compress numbers even further.
When you couple O’Gara’s options and Stringer’s otherworldly passing range/speed with the physical pressure that the likes of O’Connell, Leamy, O’Callaghan and Wallace brought to the pick and go game and you have an attacking game that was hard to stop when executed correctly.
When you have a pass that quick, you don’t need screens to generate looks – the pace of the ball does it. There are no cuts or screens on this try, just hands in a chain. But the space won at the point of the ruck by Leamy gave Stringer and O’Gara a chance to win space and time for Dowling to score in the corner.
You could see why Munster looked to recruit further world-class quality in the #12 and wing spots in the seasons to come.
This game couldn’t have been won in the manner it was without the dominance of Munster’s lineout.
Where Sale were unsure and inaccurate, Munster were laser focused and relentlessly accurate under quite a bit of aerial pressure.
Time and again, Flannery’s world-class throwing found O’Connell, O’Callaghan and Leamy all through the line. We mauled powerfully, we launched with width and speed and created try-scoring looks from the efficient machine that was the Munster lineout in 2006.
It took until the 81st minute to wrap up the job and, when it came, it came from the time and space afforded by the halfbacks.
Look at the distance and speed that Stringer gets on the initial pass to O’Gara. Everything thereafter happens outside the Sale defence and when Payne makes the 5m line, David Wallace had won the race from the other side of the field after 82 hard minutes to power over from close range and send Thomond Park into raptures and Sale to the south of France.
We had done it. A bonus-point win that would seal the pool won with the clock gone red. Just another win for the Bad Guys.
As Donncha O’Callaghan put it in an interview with the 42 in 2014;
“All I remember from that day is just the composure from Wally to get the bonus point try. Having no doubt – unbelievable faith in your team-mates – last play of the game and you need to get something out of it. Then you’ve a big player like him that just makes things happen. That’s what you need sometimes.”
The Wally Ratings: Sale (H)
The Wally Ratings explainer page is here.
Players are rated based on their time on the pitch, if they were playing notably out of position, and on the overall curve of the team performance. DNP means the player did not feature and N/A means they weren’t on the pitch long enough to warrant a fair rating.
| Names | Rating |
|---|---|
| Marcus Horan | ★★★★ |
| Jerry Flannery | ★★★★★ |
| John Hayes | ★★★★ |
| Donncha O'Callaghan | ★★★★★ |
| Paul O'Connell | ★★★★★ |
| Denis Leamy | ★★★★ |
| David Wallace | ★★★★★ |
| Anthony Foley | ★★★★★ |
| Peter Stringer | ★★★★★ |
| Ronan O'Gara | ★★★★★ |
| Ian Dowling | ★★★★★ |
| Trevor Halstead | ★★★★ |
| Barry Murphy | ★★★★★ |
| John Kelly | ★★★★ |
| Shaun Payne | ★★★★ |
| Federico Pucciariello | ★★★ |
| Denis Fogerty | N/A |
| Stephen Keogh | N/A |
| Mick O'Driscoll | N/A |
| Tomás O'Leary | N/A |
| Mossy Lawlor | N/A |
| Gary Connolly | DNP |
Notable Players
This was a top class performance from 1-15. I’ve only marked some players as four stars to try and differentiate from the players who I felt had outstanding games in this one. Leamy and Axel, for example, had big games (like Horan and Hayes) but I felt that the other guys just had that extra impact to knock them up to FIVE STAR level.
Ian Dowling and Barry Murphy came into this game without a whole lot of top level Munster experience but you’d never have known that on this game’s evidence. Murphy scored the decisive try in this game off a bouncing ball but that initial luck paved the way for one of the great finishes in Thomond Park.
Magic, and a piece of immortality. His stutter-step at pace set the plate for Dowling’s try a few minutes before. Outstanding. ★★★★★
Dowling scored a try of his own, kicked really smartly when called upon and kept Mark Cueto quiet on a night when Munster would need their edge defenders. He carried the ball incredibly well too and looked like he had been playing on big European nights his whole career. ★★★★★
Ronan O’Gara and Peter Stringer played like two men who were operating a second or two ahead of everyone else. O’Gara was near faultless off the tee and drove the Munster tank around the field with calm, ruthless accuracy. There still isn’t any other player I’d rather have standing over a penalty to this day. ★★★★★
Stringer’s passing range and speed was a key part of the win but his aggression around the ruck was as important. When Chabal was looking to break off the Sale scrum in added time, it was Stringer that was dug into him first to force the turnover.
A true great of Munster Rugby. ★★★★★
Jerry Flannery is the greatest hooker in Munster’s professional history and games like this are exactly why. He came into this season still looking to establish himself at Munster in the shadow of Frankie Sheahan but an injury to Sheahan in 2005 gave Flannery a clear run at the shirt and he made it his own.
A livewire in phase play, a good scrummager, an aggressive, narky defender and one of the best throwers of a ball I’ve ever seen. Munster needed the lineout to be rock solid to have a chance against this Sale side and Flannery produced one of the best throwing displays of his career to that point in one of the biggest games he would have played experienced at that stage in his career. ★★★★★
Paul O’Connell and Donncha O’Callaghan are icons of the game on this island and performances like this are why. Paul O’Connell we know about. A titan. A giant. One of the best to ever do it and this game showed all of the skills we know about him. Hard carrying, top class lineout work, powerful mauling and scrummaging. O’Connell and O’Callaghan were the shocktroopers Munster used to blitz Sale’s “big men” off restarts and let them know where exactly they were playing.
We can talk about “intensity” – and I do – but that, at times, can do a disservice to what were two incredibly special athletes. O’Connell tends to get most of the plaudits but O’Callaghan, for me, was right up there.
If you watch O’Callaghan in this game, for example, you’ll see a 6’6″ monster stealing lineouts, making hits and disrupting every single thing Sale wanted to do.
If they’d checked their bus on the way to the game, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see O’Callaghan rooting around in the engine pulling out parts with his bare hands. Look at him at the side of this ruck, look at his work rate to get around the corner after scrum to get to the outside pillar.
He came into this game with a mindset that he’d have to be surgically removed from Sale because that’s how far he was going to be dug into them. A brutal, animalistic, relentlessly physical performance from one of the very best to wear red. ★★★★★
There’s a line from the commentary of this game where the commentator mentions “that’s the first carry for David Wallace” as if he had been somehow absent during that time period up until that point. When I watched the game back again, Wallace ran through this game like a train. He showed up in defence, in hard carries around the fringes, and in the 81st minute when the bonus point had to be won.
Sale had the scrum, Chabal broke off the back and, when Stringer stood him up for a second, Wallace was in from the openside of the scrum to force the turnover.
On the very next scrum, Wallace beat the entire Sale pack in a race across the pitch to score the vital score that put us on course to win the tournament. Big players show up in big games and there were few bigger than Mr Five Star himself, David Wallace. ★★★★★
