In late 2019, Munster released this article to commemorate Stephen Archer about to earn his 200th cap; he would be the 11th player to join the 200 Club alongside greats like Anthony Foley, Ronan O’Gara, Peter Stringer and more. To give you an idea of how tough it is to get 200 caps for Munster – or any elite side in the professional era – Paul O’Connell didn’t make 200 appearances for this club. Peter O’Mahony will earn his 200th cap for Munster the next time he plays for the club before the end of this season, and he’ll retire at the end of it, aged 35. Conor Murray only managed it this year too, his last at the club. The great Keith Earls managed to slip into the 200 club just a few games before retiring from the game. These are players who were and are synonymous with the club, and they just about managed the 200 caps right before retiring.
Stephen Archer managed it at 31 years of age, but he would soon turn 32. Time is not kind to most rugby players – even tighthead props who’ve looked 42 since they were 19 – and you’d have got long odds on him or anyone else getting close to Donncha O’Callaghan’s monster 268 Munster cap total by the time he’d finished playing.
Well, six years on, Stephen Archer just created a Munster cap society all of his own – the 300 Club. It is an astonishing achievement of professionalism, durability and resilience, while also reflecting on the way he’s adapted his game through multiple different eras of his career.
To put it into context, since the 2019/20 season, when he hit 200, Stephen Archer earned an average of 17 caps a season across the five campaigns he’s played for the club since he officially hit his mid-30s.
At 37, soon to be 38, he has created a special part of Munster Rugby history all to himself. A few players have managed 300 caps playing for multiple clubs in the professional era. Vanishingly few have managed it at the one club.
Let me tell you who has.
Mr 300.
Summertime Archer.
He Who Remains.
Stephen Archer.
When he first broke through, I remember hearing some good things about Archer. He joined the Munster academy the summer after Munster won the second Heineken Cup – alongside guys like Ian Nagle, Tommy O’Donnell and Peter O’Mahony – so not only were vibes at the club at an all-time high, the expectations on the fellas that would eventually have to replace all of those iconic “golden generation” players were starting to get elevated too.
Archer spent two seasons in the Munster academy before getting a developmental contract for 2010/11, finishing that season with an unused bench spot in the Magners League Grand Final victory over Leinster. He got a senior deal for the season after and was off to the races as a senior pro.
At the time, tighthead props were generally considered long term investments and Archer was very much of the new breed of tightheads from a size perspective. In the 90s and most of the 2000s, tighthead props were usually between but guys like Martin Castrogiovanni, John Hayes and Carl Heyman opened up the lane for bigger, taller props as the game became more and more physical. Archer fit that description at 6’2″ and weighed north of 120kg in his prime years but still needed time to mature right out of the academy. When Archer made his step onto a senior contract the off-season before the 2011 World Cup, I don’t think he was ready to step directly into the giant Bull Hayes shaped hole in the Munster #3 jersey, especially with Tony Buckley also leaving that off season.
Munster had signed BJ Botha to essentially replace Hayes and Buckley, but John Hayes was convinced to stay on for a short while post 2011 World Cup as cover. By early 2012, though, Archer was making Heineken Cup teams and got his debut off the bench for the last six minutes against Castres in Thomond Park. He’d get another five minutes off the bench away to Northampton – the Simon Zebo hat-trick game – and it would broadly continue like that for the bigger games in the season. Archer did enough to gt a callup for the Irish Wolfhounds alongside guys like Simon Zebo, Rhys Ruddock, Devin Toner, Dave Kearney, Tomas O’Leary and Ian Madigan.
Around that era, tightheads like BJ Botha, Mike Ross and others played 75 minutes plus every other week, especially in must-win, tight games. You could see that kind of usage in games like Munster’s home QF loss to Ulster later that season when Archer was an unused sub.
By 2012/13, Archer was way more established and made his debut for Ireland against Italy in the 2013 Six Nations, despite being named on the bench against France a week previous – as I said, those were the days when it wasn’t unusual for your starting tighthead to do the full 80 minutes.
Later that year, Archer made his final appearance for Ireland with a bench appearance against Australia in November. He still made senior squads in the years to follow, but mainly played for the Wolfhounds and on a successful Emerging Ireland Churchill Cup win in Georgia in 2015.
At this point, Archer was firmly established in the Munster match day squads and was splitting 3/18 with Botha all the way through 2014/15 and looked primed to take over the starting role from Botha ahead of 2015/16. He signed a new three year deal in December 2014 which seemed to copperfasten him into that starting role.
In March of 2015, Munster negotiated another six month contract for Botha – something Archer himself would be signing ten years later – because there was uncertainty as to whether or not Archer would be involved in the 2015 World Cup and Munster were struggling to generate depth behind Archer and Botha after a series of injuries to young prospects.
In the early rounds of 2015/16, Archer suffered a serious neck injury that would send him for surgery and keep him out of the game for five months, right when Munster went on a disastrous run of results.
John Ryan, who had been a tighthead in his early years at the club but had made a great job of switching to loosehead mostly fulltime during 2014/15, more or less switched back to tighthead full-time during that season while Archer was injured, initially to mixed results. Then Botha got injured, which meant Munster bringing in Mario Sagario after the World Cup as our season lurched from bad to worse.
Near his return in March of that year, Archer told the Irish Independent;
“It’s very hard watching when you are not involved. At meetings during the weeks, and seeing how hard they were preparing and it just wasn’t clicking. And I could see how they were taking it.
“It was tough watching it from the stands. Some people would be saying, ‘Not a bad time to be injured, you’re not missing much’. But it’s tough when the lads are trying their heart out and you are sitting there watching on when it doesn’t quite work out.
“It was tough watching over Christmas especially. There was one match, the Leicester match, I found that especially difficult to watch. It was a big match in Thomond Park and I would have loved to have played in that.”
Archer had been primed for a big season. He was starting to come into his prime as a scrummager – even if he did tend to have bad matchups with nuggety, technical looseheads – but mainly as a mobile presence around the field. That neck injury set him back and, realistically, he wasn’t close to his best until the season after.
By that point, John Ryan’s scrummaging excellence gave him prominence in that Munster tighthead jersey, and that suited new Director of Rugby Rassie Erasmus down to the ground. Archer spent most of 2016/17 as a heavy hitter off the bench who was that little harder in contact and a better lineout/mauling forward for big pushes on either side of the ball late in the game.
He would continue with that role for most of the rest of his career here.
Between 2016/17 and 2023/24, Archer only had one season where over half of his appearances were as a starter – 2021/22 – before going on the best run of his career in the second half of 2022/23 where he brought everything in his career together at that point. Sure, he was well into his 30s at that stage but his passing was sharp, his scrummaging was mature, technical and heavy. His lineout lifting and maul work was always good – his best feature as a player – but that season was the perfect blend of a veteran player knowing every trick and shortcut in the book, as well as hitting something of a physical peak at the exact right time.
His performance against Leinster in the semi-final of that URC winning season is one of the gnarliest, old dog for the hard road performances you’ll ever see and he was absolutely rock solid in every facet of his game in the final two weeks later against the Stormers in Cape Town.
Since then, Archer has been on one year and then rolling six month contracts as he showcases his biggest strength during his rise to 300 caps – durability.
When others are injured, Stephen Archer is there.
When prospects don’t work out, Stephen Archer is there.
And one day one, he won’t be. He’ll retire. Maybe it’ll be this season. Maybe it won’t. Maybe he’s got one more six month deal in him. I wouldn’t be surprised.
When the idea of what a tighthead could be changed with Tadhg Furlong and then with freaks like Porter, Tupou, Atonio and others, I think guys like Stephen Archer maybe got a rough shake of it, perception wise. Is Archer the most explosive “power forward” tight prop? No. Was he ever? No. Was he a killer scrummager? No, he wasn’t really.
Did he maybe miss out on maybe four or five more Ireland caps in 2015/16 due to injury? I think so, yeah.
Does the fact that he was never a regular international change anything about his legacy as a player? No. It doesn’t.
Stephen Archer is the stuff that great clubs are built on – the prop who was old, even when he was 22, the crafty veteran, the reliable guy who’s there for every session, every drill, every meeting, the man who has been there, done that. He’s played the All Blacks, he’s played Australia, he’s played every major team in Europe twice at the very least. He’s scrummaged against big names, small names, guys you’ve never heard of and icons of the game.
Stephen Archer is the guy you can throw into any game, be it off the bench against La Rochelle or UBB or starting in a dog day regular season game when everyone outside him is injured and he’ll need to do 65 minutes plus. Stephen Archer did 80 minutes this season against Leinster in Croke Park against Andrew Porter, just a few months into his six month deal that was later extended to the end of the season because there was nobody else.
That shows the measure of the man.
When Munster have needed him, he’s almost always been there since arguably the Bull Hayes retired.
He’s not glamourous – real tightheads rarely are – and he won’t get the bright lights that maybe O’Mahony and Murray will get but 300 caps tells you a story of a man who gave sixteen years of his life to this club.
Maybe this is his last year. Maybe it isn’t.
