When stories began to circulate in November/December 2021 that Munster were talking to Dan Sheehan and Ciaran Frawley about moving south this off-season I was conflicted.
On the one hand, Sheehan and Frawley are excellent players. Sheehan, in particular, looks like a very modern power hooker with the kind of ceiling that might even overtake the excellent Ronán Kelleher in a few seasons but the more I thought about it, the more I resented the idea of an Ireland problem – your two leading hookers for the 2023 World Cup playing in the same province – leading to a jerry-rigged Munster “solution”.
If you’re the IRFU, you would ideally have your two top hookers as the #1 guys in their provincial depth chart so that they are getting the majority of the “prime” minutes in big games. With Sheehan and Kelleher at Leinster, only one of those players can start your big games and while that’s not something that’s necessarily a killer, it does put all of your developmental eggs in one basket.
That can lead to contracting difficulties down the line that, with the wrong ingredients – like a central contract going to one of the hookers and not the other – can lead to the kind of inflation that radiates throughout your squad. I’ll give you a recent example to illustrate.
Picture a player – Player 1 – playing in a unit chart with another central contract player in the same provincial squad unit. This player was (and still is) highly valued, a senior member of the squad and when his contract was coming due, it’s clear that a central contract is not in the offing from the IRFU. That immediately bumps the contract cost to retain the player because test rugby cannot be guaranteed in the way that a central contract does. The difference in money between a central contract and a high-value provincial one is, bar a few exemptions in densely packed depth charts, fairly negligible for the most part but a central contract does impart a status that a big provincial one doesn’t. It says you’re an important, crucial part of the test side and, when you’ve experienced that buzz on a big match day in the Aviva Stadium, you get why that’s something to be valued.
With all this considered, Player 1 demanded a very hefty sum (relative to the general price tier of the position) and, with the threat of [other province] lurking in the background and his importance at the time, he ended up getting it. No big deal, you’d think. Except that hefty contract distorted the wage structure at the province for a time because if Player 1 is getting X amount of money per year, then Player 2 – just as important and just as senior – will think that he should be getting the same if not more when his contract comes around, then you can see how it becomes a problem.
Again, this isn’t a squad killer, but it can be a problem that, if not now, can cause you problems down the line. It isn’t the entire reason why Andrew Porter was moved back over to loosehead – that was mostly a game-decision – but let’s put it this way, it helps Leinster’s and the IRFU’s bottom line to have a guy on a central contract that you can play for 60 minutes in big games rather than splitting his minutes with Tadhg Furlong, another guy on a central contract.
It’s a bit like the old saying that if you owe the bank €100, that’s a “you” problem.
If you owe the bank €100,000,000 that’s a “bank” problem.
From an IRFU perspective, Leinster having four of the Irish front five slots for the next three years is a “bank” problem so you can see why they would look to “spread out” some of the talent to another province.
It’s pretty plain to see that Sheehan wants to play for Leinster and even with the kind of encouragement that the IRFU can bring – everything from financial incentives, to questions about your “ambition” even so far as close to a guarantee as you can get that you’ll get test rugby – he didn’t want to move. I’d even heard as much as the IRFU changing up some of the contracting tiers to make carrying an “expensive” retention down the depth chart even more expensive.
Basically, at the level Dan Sheehan is playing at right now and the potential he has, you could make an argument that he would be on a deal relatively close to Ronán Kelleher and the next time both players are off-contract on the same cycle, it could be – could – a difficult negotiation with no way to keep both players happy without blowing up your contracting tiers.
Whatever happens with that negotiation – or future ones – I do not want Munster to be an off-ramp for Leinster players who just want an outlet to better their Ireland ambitions. That, for me, is not a route to success for Munster even if the players in question would be an immediate improvement on a Munster depth chart. Lads coming down the M7 with tears in their eyes are not the solution to making Munster a trophy-winning entity once again.
If you’re talking about players who actively want to come to Munster to play FOR Munster, that’s a different story but, for me, the days of offering Leinster players who fundamentally don’t want to leave Dublin a back-door into the Irish team have to be left in the late 2010s.
Getting Leinster born talent into the Munster academy – like Eoghan Clarke a few years back, even if he didn’t work out to the level we expected – is something completely different and, in small doses and only for high potential targets, it absolutely should be looked at but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m not even talking about guys who might have come up through the Leinster system and then found their careers taking them elsewhere, I’m specifically talking about players who might be second or third in a Leinster depth chart – even in a two-man position – and trying to plamás those guys into coming down the road to enhance their Irish prospects. It’s a losing strategy.
Munster will never overhaul Leinster by starting guys who don’t start for them.
There’s space for down chart depth guys and starters like Carbery that Leinster badly wanted to retain but if players need too much in the way of convincing, this is not and should not be the right club for them.
This might read like Munster Rugby for Munster Born Players Only and that really isn’t my intention. I think a Toulouse-like structure of 70% Munster academy, 15% Irish Qualified and 15% NIQ is achievable and the kind of ratio that can be successful here.
We have a tonne of talent in the province already both in the senior squad, the academy and in the layer below with guys like Moloney, MacSweeney, Ryan, O’Connor, O’Connell, Toland, the Sheahan’s, Ruadhan Quinn, the latest West Cork Mafia batch and then longer-term guys like Sean Edogbo, Neff Giwa and others.
Munster can be successful with what we have in the province already. I really do believe that. They just need time. For now, even in the short term, we have to look inwards instead of east to fix any issues that need fixing.
