As I walked back into the city on a jostling Monahan Road, I could feel myself getting carried along by the euphoria of the crowd. Munster 28 South Africa A 14. They were the Select XV pre-game, South Africa A at halftime but they might as well have been the World Champion Springboks by full-time. It was one of those nights for Munster. A little bit of mania, a little bit of what the hell is going on here and a little bit of history all rolled into one. It was one of those occasions that only seem to happen to this wonderful proper club of ours and it was a privilege for me to attend.
I decided to skip out on the post-match press conference to get a start back on the road to Limerick so I was right in the teeth of the thousands of Munster fans streaming out of Páirc Uí Chaoimh with spatters of rain dancing in the wind above us. There was euphoria, there were horns being blown, there were songs – The Fields, Stand Up & Fight and, increasingly, Zombie – and there were the small moments where you can see children begin to fall in love with Munster.
They weren’t falling in love with rugby. No. They were falling in love with Munster. That’s a very different thing. With my first child on the way in a few short months now, I couldn’t help but notice the fathers and mothers bringing their own smallies to the game so I heard all the questions about the players, all the talk about McDonalds’ on the way home, all the talk of going again the next time.
This is what it’s all about.
But I saw more than that too – groups of young people in that blissful state that’s slightly more than half-cut, just a few pints short of langers on their way into the city to rectify that. I saw bars jammed full of Munster jerseys, training gear, jackets and scarves.
I saw every type of person you can imagine as I walked in.
The wide-eyed newbie high on the atmosphere. The “haven’t been to a game since 2008” penitent. The mother that had to go along to mind her two kids who got tickets at the club but actually quite enjoyed the game. The Leinster fan that ended up at the game late on and ended up feeling something he hadn’t felt in a while and wasn’t quite sure how to process it. The guy who still thought Johann Van Graan was the head coach. The young lad around 10 who thought Edwin Edogbo was the coolest guy out there. The guy who was talking to his friend in the red jacket about listening to the press conference where Rowntree asked about my swimming lessons (if you’re reading this, I was right behind you as ye walked past Kennedy Park). The lad who kept singing “and their bombs and their buns” as he kept singing Zombie.
There was every type of Munster fan there.
41,400 of us.
In the last 18 months, I’ve seen a lot of talk from Dublin-based journalists and ex-pros in need of appearance fees for some reason and they all seem sure that Munster and the Munster fanbase have “disconnected”. What does this mean? I’m not quite sure really. Only that it is bad. Is it that the fans don’t like Munster anymore? Have they forgotten that Munster exists?
A few empty seats in Thomond Park for a game rescheduled because of Leinster’s covid problems at Christmas was proof positive of this. Yet Munster still had the highest percentage of capacity used of all the Irish provinces last season at 66%, and that was including one game where Thomond Park’s attendance was limited to 5000 people.
So what is this disconnect, really?
Some of that is to do with on-field results during the tail end of the Van Graan era, some of it was a deep misunderstanding that people were (and still are) skittish about going to places with large crowds immediately post-pandemic, and some of it was that weird “what, you weren’t paid to go to the game and get in for free?” disconnect from reality that a lot of Dublin sports journalists have when they’re told that there’s a cost of living crisis. Some of it is journalists talking to one crank and assuming that crank represents 10,000 people.
In my opinion, I think that to enhance their criticism of Munster as a concept, a lot of outlets start with the idea of the “16th Man” and “the best fans in the world” because it’s always bothered them that Leinst- I mean, other teams, don’t have the same rep. When you see criticism aimed specifically at Munster’s attendance ahead of any other teams, it’s because they want to chip away at what they see as an edifice. “Best fans in the world?? Where are they for a league match against Dragons then??”
Most of these guys couldn’t explain a basic attacking framework if there was a gun to their head so they go with the grand concepts, something a child could understand.
At its core, what they talk about can be boiled down into this statement.
Munster Are So Bad That Their So-Called Fans Are Deserting Them, Can You Believe It? Click Here To Find Out More.
This is all they are ever saying and when you realise that, you’ll never get worked by them ever again.
Paul O’Connell once said, “they think they know us, but they haven’t a clue”.
What was true then is true now.
Munster isn’t perfect right now – onfield or off – but that’s the appeal. The 41,000 people who showed up on a wet Thursday evening in Cork did so without seeing Munster lift a trophy since 2011. A lot of the kids I saw walking out of the stadium weren’t born when Paul O’Connell and Ronan O’Gara lifted the Magners League trophy in 2011. The kids born the same month Munster last won the Heineken Cup in 2008 are in secondary school now.
So why are they there? Why did 41,000 people show up to Páirc Uí Chaoimh and sell it out in four days a few months ago if trophies are everything, Munster are a basketcase and they are disconnected from the province? Because they love this club, or they loved this club and will love it again, or it was something to do on a Thursday night, or it was a novelty and for all of those people who showed up they got to see a young Munster team beat a team they had no right to on paper and make it look routine.
They saw guys that grew up in towns just like theirs – Edwin Edogbo, John Hodnett, Gavin Coombes, Ben Healy, Josh Wycherley, Shane Daly and more – or who grew up in the shadows of that very stadium like Simon Zebo and Alex Kendellen, or guys who have come to know and love this place like Mike Haley, Antoine Frisch and Paddy Patterson or guys who have been here for a cup of coffee scrapping like they’ve always been here and always will like Kiran McDonald. They saw those guys fighting for that red jersey and feeding off the energy rolling down off the stands like the great men who’ve gone before.
Give us everything and we’ll give it right back to you. That’s the promise between Munster players and fans and we all lived up to it on Thursday night.
They think they know us.
They haven’t a clue. They never have.
