In the last few weeks, you’d have been forgiven for falling into the doom and gloom around the province. Without listening to a single podcast or reading a single article, you’d have seen the results, and they, for the most part, haven’t been good enough in the last few months, not by a long shot.

If you’ve been listening to everything else, you’d have seen a whirlwind of negativity from the club seeking 10 or so redundancies, to varying degrees of Munster Woe.

As is almost always the case, however, things are rarely as good as you’re told, or as bad as you’re warned. There are only a few inches between a kick in the ass and the pat on the back, and we know that well around these parts.

Of course, there’s pressure now to finish in the top eight, and with two of the last four URC games being highly contested interpros, that brings its own anxiety, but as the club’s sole focus, I think that’s more than achievable. It’ll need a big turnaround in performance, but that’s the challenge the team faces over the next month. Get it right on the field and off. I genuinely believe we can and will do that.

But what about next season?

With your season ticket coming up again in the next few days, what is there to look forward to?

That’s ultimately what it comes down to with any sports team, isn’t it? It’s about hope. It’s about seeing the vision and buying into it.

Do Munster have a vision? A plan? Absolutely. If I were to put this season into context, as I have tried to do since preseason, I would describe it as Year Zero of Clayton McMillan’s tenure. There has been good, there has been bad, but more importantly, there has been an awful lot learned about how the club will look to move forward in the next few years as a sustainable and trophy-contesting side.

The first pillar of that is recruitment and player development. The signing of Marnus Van Der Merwe ahead of next season is a vital addition to Munster’s front row profile.

As a scrummager, as a physical presence, he is something different that gives Munster some real heft at the core of the tight exchanges that have bedevilled us at times in the last two or three seasons. Van Der Merwe was heavily sought after by clubs in the Prem and TOP14, so getting him over the line is a huge piece of business for the club.

When you add in another tighthead to that rotation — Jack Aungier has been heavily rumoured — then you turn an area that has been a real weakness this season into something of a non-factor at worst, a net positive at best. The injuries at tighthead prop this season have had an outsized effect on the team, and that will hopefully be addressed next season.

There is real excitement about what Ronan Foxe can become in the next two seasons. He’s been unlucky with injuries so far at Munster — in general, and this season specifically — but he will hopefully be a cornerstone player that the club will build around going forward.

At 130kg, and with some key development landmarks already in the bag, he’s ready for a breakout season, supported by what we already have and some smart signings from outside.

From what I’ve heard, Munster might also be looking to make a signing of a player capable of playing #10/15 as a priority for next season, too, to add a little bit more playmaking variety and coverage to the squad as a whole.

Coaching will also be important here, even allowing for the selfless, 24/7 job that Sean Cronin has done this season to cover a gap in coaching, and it’s my understanding that Munster will be making an experienced appointment in this unit, with a scrum-focused forward coach. That, along with a senior coach appointment with a general focus on the attack, will hopefully be announced in the next week or so.

That coaching evolution is probably the most important thing to take from this season. I don’t think it’s delusional to say that this group is much, much better than results have shown. Have elements of what we’ve been doing gone a little stale? A little too prone to getting shut down by the opposition, even allowing for core areas of our squad — like the front five in a general sense — also getting a little stale?

I think that’s fair to say.

I think it’s also fair to say that Munster aren’t stupid, either, or oblivious. The club are deeply aware that this season hasn’t been good enough and that, at this point, an excellent start to the season has been broadly squandered after a very difficult middle block to the season that saw the club crash out of the Champions Cup, and then out of the Challenge Cup with a listless performance away to Exeter.

That has sharpened the focus as the season has gone on. A rebuild is needed — clearly — and that’s the intent, but how? In the Irish system, a rebuild can only be done on young talent, and, fundamentally, Munster believe that they have a core of young players coming up across every single unit in the team that is better than any collective group that has come through the province since the 2000s.

If you look through the Irish 20s sides of the last few years, you see many of the standout players being Munster players. Foxe, O’Connor, Gleeson, Edogbo, Quinn, O’Connell, Murphy, Minogue, Foy and then this season with Wood, Foley, Conway, O’Shea, O’Leary, and Barrett, and you could add another bunch of players in that conversation, too.

I’ll put it like this: between 2017 and 2022, you could count on one hand the number of players Munster had to fight to retain at the club due to offers elsewhere.

In our current group of NTS, academy and first-year senior players, the number of outside offers from all over Ireland, the UK and France has exploded.

That tells us quite clearly that the talent is there; we just have to lean into it and empower it. This is what Munster intends to do. Munster do not intend to overcorrect after a bad few months and stymie the development of what could well be a generational core of young talent, both in the academy already, and to come into the academy in the next few months. For the first time in well over a decade, we have elite prospects coming through every single unit of the team.

There is only one way to build a trophy-contesting side in Ireland, and it’s from within. The pieces are in place, the quality is there, and the incoming coaching clarity will empower this new, younger Munster to attack next season and beyond in a way that should be deeply familiar to Munster fans all over the country.

This season has marked an end to the journeys of some great stalwarts for the club, and the beginning for others.

The only question is whether you’ll be there for that journey to come.