“What other people think of you is none of your business” — Regina Brett.
If you work in rugby long enough, you’ll hear some player or coach talk about “the outside noise” — the media causing a hubbub, essentially — and how they, the player or coach in question, are fully sure that nobody in the building is listening to it.
They are uniquely focused, despite the very loud, distinctly audible outside noise.
It’s almost always not true. Rugby players and coaches are like everyone else; they have a black rectangle of misery in their pockets that brings them all the horrors of the modern world, one post after another — algorithmic sadism. If you’re in the public eye, it’s impossible not to be aware of what almost everyone is saying about you.
Craig Casey and Diarmuid Barron made that plain in their post-match interviews last weekend and rightly so. Journalists and media types tend to get the hump incredibly quickly when players/coaches bite back at them, but if you are comfortable criticising others in public, don’t be surprised if you get it back the odd time.
But my point is that everyone is aware of the outside noise; everyone can hear it, and everyone is affected by it, so we have to make sure there is no noise at all.
The omniglobular Rugby Media will find something to criticise Munster for, but we don’t need to be handing them freebies.
Munster are the biggest draw in the Irish rugby media outside of the men’s national team during the Six Nations. This is self-evidently true. If you keep an eye on the mainstream media’s YouTube posts for their weekly podcasts, you’ll see the A/B testing they know well themselves; Munster in the thumbnail = click.
The media will set their own agenda — Munster can’t be bound by it.
By any measure, the only way this season will be seen as a success in the most basic sense is if we win the URC title in three weeks. Qualifying for the Champions Cup next season in fifth — no easy feat in the modern URC — isn’t nothing, by any means, but with our European campaign falling so flat, combined with the outside noise, only a URC semi-final gets us to par, and winning the final moves us into the positive. If we lose to the Bulls next weekend, the season is something of a bust.
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t positives that will show up next season or the season after that have their roots in this season, but Munster are here to win trophies and go deep in Europe. We might yet do the former; we failed at the latter. That’s a fact.
In the grand scheme of the next few years, we have to become comfortable living with what might seem like unfair expectations of the club. Those expectations are that Munster are a top-two side in the URC and a top-four side in Europe, and if those expectations ever change, that’s where the real trouble begins. It’s where we should be.
The fact that we’re not currently in that European discussion is, for me, the biggest bugbear of the last few seasons. The Investec Champions Cup is a shadow of its former self. It’s a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.
Yet we’re nowhere near even making a semi-final at the moment, never mind winning the damn thing. There are reasons for that, of course; there are reasons for everything. People are sick to death of reasons, and they’re sick of context.
One of the main reasons Munster got a head coach of Clayton McMillan’s calibre was to cut through context and start the actual hard work of building a team capable of competing at that level. If it takes us two seasons to get to a place where we can compete at that level in the third year, I think everyone would make that deal if they could be asked about it in four years, if and when it’s successful.
“Trade two years for five or six seasons at the top end of Europe?”
If that was the deal, I’d take it, but there’s no guarantee of success in these karmic tradeoffs, because it’s so much more complicated than that.
What is success?
Step 1: The Right Coaching Unit
Step 2: The Right System
Step 3: The Right Players.
That’s literally all it is. I think we’re at Step 1 right now, with Steps 2 and 3 to follow. If we get it right, I think the calibre of player we have in the group should see us in that top-four discussion in Europe inside the next two years. Everything else will flow from there, but we need to get our act together off the field, too.
Make it easier for success to happen here, or it won’t happen at all.
