There’s no such thing as a clean slate, in life or in rugby. Take it from a guy who’s currently on his fourth life – something from the previous iteration always bleeds through at some point. We tell ourselves at the beginning of the clean slate that this time will be different, that all we need is a hard cut-off between then and now and everything will be fine but real life doesn’t work like that. What starts as a clean slate often becomes an ever-clearing window that juxtaposes the then we wanted to forget with the now we wanted to start fresh with.

We are never free from the past. Not really. No matter what we tell ourselves. The only thing we can do is “be different than before”. Keep doing that and you can be at least judged on what you do now, today, as opposed to being lumped in as just an extension of the past.

And for Munster, the past weighs heavily. Specifically, the now distant past of the 2000s and the recent Decade of Disappointment, where the former needles heavily at the latter.

Munster’s 2012 to 2022 hasn’t been that bad if you zoom out a little. 90% of the clubs in the European game would snatch your hand off for five Heineken Cup semi-finals, five URC semi-finals and three losing URC final appearances along with some notable big game occasions but for Munster, this should be considered a failure. An exponential one, actually, because with each season that passes, the weight grinds on us a little heavier making success more difficult to attain.

That’s where Graham Rowntree, Munster’s new head coach, finds himself right now. When Johann Van Graan, Stephen Larkham and JP Ferreira finally and officially left at the start of July, a five-season era ended with them. It would be easy to suggest that Rowntree will never have more time to build than he has right now in late July 2022 but I don’t think that’s true at all.

Rowntree is on a two-year contract, which is relatively small in head coaching terms, and Mike Prendergast, his attack coach, is on a longer-term deal as of the time of writing. The second year of Rowntree’s deal straddles the 2023 World Cup where a lot of big-name coaches might well be looking for the next step in December 2023 – prime coaching hiring/best of luck season – so, for Rowntree, he needs to hit the ground running this season to ensure he gets a further contract extension, at least a year, to build the team in the manner that he wants. If he can start well, he could essentially get himself onto a three-year deal to take him to the post-World Cup season by December 2022.

As of now, Rowntree will have one window to sign, retain and release the players he thinks will lead Munster to a trophy before Munster and the IRFU start making decisions about whether someone else might do a better job or be a better fit. In reality, I think he’s got the first six months of this season to put down the kind of results that make that an easy, pragmatic decision for them to make.

So there is no free hitout this upcoming season. No handy tuning up period. Rowntree’s Munster must start fast, must pick up wins and make the case that he is the man for the medium to long term, not the short to medium term as his current contract length might suggest.

That is almost a truism, though. Coach Must Win Games is as obvious as they come but it’s not even about wins, so much as it is about making statements.

For example, Johann Van Graan had a better win percentage than Declan Kidney’s second, two Heineken Cup-winning spell at Munster but, unlike Kidney, Van Graan’s tenure was defined by always losing The Big One. Van Graan’s Munster only lost 9 more games than Kidney’s 05-08 team despite playing two campaigns more but I think Johann would gladly sacrifice a few more scuffed losses on his record if it meant even one trophy in the cabinet during his four and half seasons at the club. Van Graan’s Munster got smaller and more nervous when the big days rolled around – with the exception of his last European knockout game against Toulouse – but it wasn’t even limited to just those big games either. Losing to a poor Connacht side when we had the fugazi Rainbow Cup to shoot for after doing the hard part, beating Leinster away, was quite typical of Van Graan’s Munster when we’re talking about the downside.

Speaking to other coaches around the game and people at other clubs, all agreed that Johann Van Graan was an absolute gentleman but they knew that he and his team could be bullied and sent screeching to the referee looking for penalties that would never come with the right approach on and off the field. That, combined with the very real perception amongst the squad that Johann Van Graan always wanted to “take the high road” in the media, even if it meant letting slights from other coaches and the media land and simmer, like the ones that were regularly thrown his way by Leo Cullen and various pundits/columnists, left a feeling out there that Munster had gone soft.

I don’t think it’s true – that we’d gone soft – but it’s an easy connection to make. We were regularly bullied by Leinster, in particular, on the field and when it came to off the field… well, let’s put it this way, Van Graan isn’t the type of guy to start dropping stingers in pressers and I should know, I’ve been at almost every one of them for the last two seasons. Sometimes I think he might have been better off taking the low road and throwing a few digs. It was more than warranted, more than once.

Van Graan wanted his team to do the talking on the field but that rarely happened.

That all lead to the idea that, in the last three years generally but the last two season’s specifically, people didn’t really know who Munster were anymore. On the field, off the field, we were a bit of a mystery. Winning most of our regular season/Heineken Cup pool games didn’t really cut it anymore because, after four and a half seasons, people struggled to hang their hats on Munster’s on-field identity.

That’s one of the first things that Rowntree has to do – form an on-field identity while winning matches. In some ways, the first and best thing that Rowntree can do is to very visibly distinguish himself from the Van Graan era. On the field, I think that means a distinct, bolshy, offensive approach that is less concerned with the opposition and more concerned with dictating a game on them.

Off the field, I think Rowntree could really herald in a new era by making a switch at captain. Peter O’Mahony has been a great servant to Munster Rugby but he’s in the last year of his deal ahead of his last World Cup (most likely), he’s been captain for nine years (Paul O’Connell was captain for five years, to put some recent historic scale on it) and I think it’s past due for a change there. Rowntree making that change this summer signals to everyone that what we’re seeing is something new.

And it will make a statement.

Clouds on the Horizon

The hardest part of any new head coach’s job is cutting guys. Recruiting guys is difficult, in one way, because you’ve got to sell them on yourself and your project first and foremost but that’s almost always positive. Here’s what we’re doing, here’s how we see you making us better. It’s all about how things can be better with them.

When you’re cutting guys, however, you’re essentially saying that things will be better without them, except you can’t really put it that way. Rowntree will have to cut this coming season and cut relatively deep.

Covid might be at the back of our minds now but the financial impact of it is still being felt in playing budgets all over the game and Ireland is no different. Cuts will be needed, and they will be made. The new URC format (with only three or four test window games this season) allows for smaller, more condensed and less “middle heavy” squads. To an extent, that cutting was put off across the provinces in 2021/22 because of the upcoming World Cup season. All four provinces expect to have very limited access to their internationals ahead of the 2023 World Cup, so keeping that extra layer of upper-middle tier contract players makes a tonne of sense.

Next season, though, all bets are off and I would expect a large restructuring of provincial squads. This upcoming season, Rowntree has 22 senior players off contract. I would expect 8, maybe 10 max will be retained for the post-World Cup season.

I’ll get into what I believe those will be in the next instalment of this series but that cutting will pose a significant challenge for Rowntree in his first season. The IRFU is mandating that all the provinces cut their budgets and fill mid-tier squad places with recent academy graduates. Last season, I wrote that if you’re 26+ with no recent test squad involvement and you’re on a mid to upper-tier senior contract, you were in big danger of not getting renewed and that largely held true. Munster lost Kevin O’Byrne, Jason Jenkins, Matt Gallagher, Chris Cloete, Jake Flannery and John Ryan this off-season. We could be looking at even bigger names next season as we reshape the squad to a younger profile.

All that awaits Graham Rowntree as he tries to Rebuild The Big Red Machine.

Coming Up

Part 2 :: The Front Row Depth Chart

Part 3 :: Second Row & Half Lock Depth Chart

Part 4 :: The Back Row Depth Chart

Part 5 :: Halfback Depth Chart

Part 6 :: Outside Backs Depth Chart

Part 7 :: Style of Play