News: Saints v Munster HC Preview

By RedSaint
October 9 2009

From his vantage point in Deepest Russia, RedSaint has cast his eye and keyboard over Saturday's opening Heineken Cup match with Munster at Franklin's Gardens. This game looks to be a cracker and with his usual insightful and simile laden preview (More similes than Mr Simile on simile day in the Bookshop) RedSaint assesses the chances for each team.

Heineken Cup, Pool 1, Round 1

NORTHAMPTON SAINTS vs. MUNSTER

Saturday, 10th October, 2009 - 21:00 MSK

The Heineken Cup

Northampton Saints are alone in European rugby in being able to boast a thing as rare as a "no comment" from the Wasps coaching staff - a 100% victory rate over Munster in the Heineken Cup. Of course, statistics can be used to prove anything. There is a man in Middlesex who can use them to show that Harlequins fans prefer to watch games of rugby at The Stoop rather than wander aimlessly back and forth in front of the stands for 80 minutes, someone in Reading who can use them to argue that the Madejski Stadium is the world's beating heart of rugby bonhomie, and a man from Earls Barton who can use them to prove the gaseous stodge sold as bitter in the Rodber below the Tetley's Stand is actually a CAMRA Champion Beer of Britain gold medal-winning real ale.

The reason for this statistic existing is due in part to a combination of luck of the draw and the Saints' desire to scramble around the backwaters of English rugby in National League 1 for a year in a competition so meaningless it could have been pre-sponsorship era Celtic League. This has meant that for the ten years that have passed since they lifted club rugby's biggest prize, Northampton have avoided the prize draw in northern hemisphere rugby - Munster, who are the very essence of the Heineken Cup to the same extent that the sight of Dewi Morris doing everything but actually kiss Stuart Barnes is the very essence of the Rugby Club.

It is therefore fitting that the tin anniversary of that win sees Saints having drawn the team they beat in May 2000. While Saints will likely start with just three players who played in their last Heineken Cup game, a semi-final in 2007, Munster could feature twice as many players from their 22 who played in the fifth HEC final. These six won't need a reminder, but just for the record for bitter Irish journalists and people not old enough to remember, Pat Lam's battered Northampton side that day doggedly put Munster to the sword to deservedly win 9-8 at Twickenham in the club's finest hour.

Northampton qualified for this year's edition of the Heineken Cup by adding the second tier European Challenge Cup to their hardly bursting-at-the-seams trophy cabinet and, as reward for depriving Wasps of their birthright to a place in the top tournament, have been punished by being placed in the obligatory group of death. Forget the Sale and Harlequins group, which features four teams so far out of form it's a wonder Martin Johnson hasn't brought them into the EPS en masse, Pool 1 brings together not only the Celtic and ECC champions, but the champions of France and Italy to boot. The strength of the group probably means Perpignan will again remain as far from realising their dream of a Barcelona quarter-final as Worcester are from playing Heineken Cup rugby, and Treviso, soon not to exist as the Italian Rugby Union shows off its Celtic credentials in choosing its Magners League teams with a decision-making process as ludicrous as the idea to grant Llanelli a stand-alone franchise, will be happy with anything better than the Scarlets' recent feat of a clean sweep of loses.

Have no doubt about it - Saints are back in the big time, and what an opening fixture - for which our thanks should go to Rupert Murdoch. Everyone loves Munster, no one more so than the Australian philanthropist, who, with the same sort of predictability normally only present in Royle Family punchlines, has once again decreed that Munster play at Thomond Park in round 6.

The Munster pack

Munster only ended their preseason when they played fierce rivals Leinster last week and when I heard that they had been nilled by the Dubliners I laughed harder than I had since Margaret Thatcher cried on TV. It turns out Munster couldn't have been more dominated without swapping their strips for leather outfits, and having two well-spoken ladies bark orders at them in exquisite German.

It is perhaps no coincidence then that the two best hookers in the British Isles not competent in issuing the imperative auf Deutsch will take to the field to square off against each on Saturday. Jerry Flannery, who may start in place of Denis Fogarty, was initially only famous for using a certain seven letters to describe Steve Thompson years before Saints' New Zealand contingent thought of them, but he has since developed into the undisputed best number 2 on the continent. A highly unfortunate elbow injury prevented him from saving Phil Vickery's head from being wedged into his pelvic bone in Durban for the Lions and he will be longing to make quick amends, starting with battle against Saints captain Dylan Hartley, who was himself somehow overlooked in favour of Lee Mears, who would himself have been a far greater asset in South Africa had the try lines been moved to the sides of the pitch.

John Hayes, will be missing from the front row due to an out of character moment last weekend which saw him attempt to turn Cian Healey's face into something with as many holes as a Radio Northampton match commentary. The Bull, who wasn't by any means the worst prop called up for Lions rugby in South Africa, will leave a big hole to fill, but instead on the tight side the Reds will haveTony Buckley, perhaps the first prop Tiny will have faced who will make him look his nickname. In fact, such is the size of Mushy as he is known (6 ft 5 ins),, that Buckley would only have to don a skirt shorter than Henry Paul's international rugby union career and he would fit right in with the women attempting to take each other's heads off with bottles of WKD Blue that Munster fans wishing to experience the real Northampton will be able to see on Bridge Street at around 02:00 on Sunday morning. Churchill Cup watchers will have seen Buckley utilise his size this summer, as he did his best impression of the Russian army and ran unhindered through half the population of Georgia to score his second try of the tournament. Saints must beware him coming from deep anywhere near the line.

Backing the impressive front row up in the engine room will be Paul O'Connell, a man who had the unfortunate experience of having Sky Sports report live from somewhere halfway up his digestive tract for the entire duration of June. There was always the nagging belief that handing POC the Lions captaincy was the equivalent of handing someone a bowl of soup, but only giving them a knife and a fork to eat it with. This is not the case with Munster - POC is the heartbeat of the team and Saints won't get a look in unless they can cope with his presence both at the lineout and in the referee's ear ensuring that Munster have to-date won more 50-50 Heineken refereeing calls than the number of caps England have awarded plodding one-dimensional centres.

POC is likely to line up alongside fellow totem Donncha O'Callaghan. DOC, too, wasn't overly impressive in South Africa, his major contribution being bringing an ability to run toward the changing room slightly faster than anyone else at half- and full-time to the mid-week captaincy, but his Heineken pedigree is impeccable. His namesake, one-time Saints target Donncha Ryan, could start at 5 or 6 and will give more options in the line out than there are options of quality drinking establishments in the whole of Northampton. The back row triumvirate may see him pack down with David Wallace on the openside and Denis Leamy at 8. Saints' back row may be our biggest strength, but there will be no harder challenge than that presented by Munster this weekend.

The Munster backs

In the backs, Tomas O'Leary is, like Flannery, another who saw injury wipe out his Lions call, and if that wasn't bad enough he then had to witness the affront of Harry Ellis claiming the number 20 shirt which should, by rights, have been his. A sniper in the Dawson mould, TOL is a danger around the fringes and has excellent distribution. Not that that will necessarily matter, depending who Munster pick at fly-half.

Ronan O'Gara is one of the most accomplished figures in world rugby and needs no introduction. Here is a man who has done everything on the world stage. He has single-handedly won internationals, Heineken Cups, Six Nations' Grand Slams and Lions tours, once even for his own team. However, the coaching team's decision to put him in the centre instead of Mike Phillips in the second test in South Africa was as big a crime as coming to Russia and drinking Smirnoff. It will be hard not to shiver every time he touches the ball, as there will always be a second of worry that the red shirt he is wearing is in fact a Lions one. However, with reports suggesting that ROG's form is dropping further than Michael Lipman's jaw upon learning that yes, a sporting organisation can ask its athletes to take drugs tests, there is a real danger that Munster could line up with Paul Warwick at 10. Not only would this significantly increase Munster's attacking threat and options, it would mean that there is the possibility fans will have the chance to cheer two fly-halves for this summer royally pissing off the Notnots' Toby Booth, a man whose incessant whining is broadcast as a form of perverse torture to extract confessions from inmates in Uzbek prisons.

Presumably, Munster's latest three-letter acronym signing, Jean de Villiers, would also like the Warwick option - I cannot imagine JdV signed for the Reds just to see O'Gara kick to the corner or fire passes into the opposing inside centre's bread basket. The stereotypical Munster would see him line up alongside fellow midfield aesthete Lifeimi Mafi, a player signed just in case the ball ever emerges from the Munster pack so he can take it straight back in there. Together they form a centre partnership so impenetrable it is the rugby equivalent of Stalingrad, and one which will be specifically lined up to offer Shane Geraghty free strength-of-neck tests should he have the temerity to attempt to run down the 12 channel.

However, a team capable of fielding ROG at fly-half for over 10 years is capable of anything, and if they don't want a centre pairing so conservative that backs moves are communicated via indignant letters in the Daily Mail, it is not inconceivable that Keith Earls could line up at 13. Now that Munster no longer include contractual clauses obliging their wingers not to stray beyond the 5m tramlines except at half- and full-time, they could field a back three of Felix Jones at 15, Ian Dowling on one wing and the All Blacksí all-time top try scorer Doug Howlett on the other, meaning they'd have pace to burn like it was an English-owned second home.

The Saints side

Not that the Saints back three are short on speed. Ben Foden is a shoo-in for the fullback slot, although from what I've seen this season I don't quite know how he manages to make Sky Sports' Irish commentator fake a coronary in rugby's answer to When Harry Met Sally every time he touches the ball. You can bet Munster will be giving Foden attention slightly less fawning in nature and this stage is one Foden needs to perform on to back up the bumlicking he's been receiving from the press if he wants international recognition this autumn.

Bruce Reihana has returned to the wing, where his form has seen him reinforce claims to being the best import ever to play Premiership rugby. After stagnating as a full back making less line breaks than Rob Kearney, Bruce has been on fire this year and has added a new-found ability to boom over penalties from his own 22 to his all-round footballing skills. Who lines up on the other wing is a more intriguing option. As rugby isn't the global banking industry, Chris Ashton might actually find himself dropped to the bench as punishment for his mistake which gifted Wasps a try last week instead of being paid off with £65 million in taxpayers' money and given a new chauffeur-driven BMW. I'd be tempted to keep him in the side, but Paul Diggin must be champing at the bit to start again.

This game calls for the Cup Final Team, and at outside centre that means Jon Clarke. Clarke has been quietly playing himself into the form which saw him on the edge of England selection in 2006 and seems to feed off of Geraghty's attack-minded play as he did with Carlos Spencer. Inside him, James Downey must be the first name on the team-sheet. Although the possibility of trying the Myler-Geraghty tandem again is appealing, Munster's brick outhouse centre partnership cries out for Downey's no nonsense game and despite the perception that the only thing he has ever passed on a rugby pitch is wind, JD has deft enough hands to open up defences. Not so deft that Munster aren't lining up a mile of white pudding in a bid to entice him to watch their pack fall over the ball for 80 minutes from their 12 shirt from next season thoughÖ

Geraghty himself is playing well enough at fly-half to be making the England selectors take notice, although being neither big nor predictable, he only ticks 'playing out of position' on Twickenham's inside centre wish list. He has even been able to deal admirably with the unpredictable delivery of the few balls Lee Dickson has seen fit to pass out beyond retreating lazy runners - good practice for standing outside Harry Ellis. Dickson hasn't had the best of starts to the season, with some of his service so slow and reluctant I only normally encounter it in Moscow restaurants, but he is a fighter and, unless Jim's curveball this week is Foden at 9 to get Digger back into the side, will start at scrum-half.

Soane Tonga'uiha now looks like the player we all hoped he would become, having since his arrival undergone a transformation so great it's only been outdone by Take That reinventing themselves as Coldplay. There are big question marks about Buckley's scrummaging ability and if the Tongan can get underneath him, Mushy could be under as much pressure as Robbie Morris' belt after a visit to the Weedon Road chippie. With Hayes out, Munster's front row is vulnerable. Bonorino is our best scrummaging tighthead and needs to start, even if he is about as mobile as a baobab tree. Between them Hartley is likely to be given more attention than a bra in a monastery, but he has led a team which has yet to receive a yellow card this season by example and from the front. Is Dylan the caricature villain opposition fans still think, or a driven player set to lead Saints forward for years? On Saturday he will give the answer and I have every confidence in him.

The back five in the scrum offers Saints an embarrassment of riches, even before Dan Vickerman becomes available later in the year. Juandre Kruger has had as big an influence on Saints' lineout as Judge Jeff Blackett has on favourable disciplinary hearings for Wasps, and will hopefully have got some tips from his former mentor at the Blue Bulls on how to take apart POC's game in the air. Is Ignacio Fernandez Lobbe's experience and calming influence going to be more use in the first 50 minutes or the last 30? Is Courtney Lawes the real deal and ready to line-up against the best lock pairing in the northern hemisphere? These are questions that Jim Mallinder will have the answers to, but I'd also like to ask him if it is possible to put Lawes on the pitch at the same time as Peter Stringer? Please?

How do you choose who to start in the back row? First would be to decide what number Phil Dowson wears. He can do the job at 7, but I feel we really need Scott Gray to play the fetcher's role. If you want to bring aggression to the contact area, Neil Best starts at 6. Best could have had run the length of the pitch with the whole Munster pack on his back and not been picked by Eddie O'Sullivan, but Declan Kidney has indicated the door for national selection remains open to the Ulsterman and I'm backing Best to put in the sort of authoritative big match display he gave against Bourgoin in May. At 8, I'm going for Wilson, not because he and Best go together better than The Western Mail and ridiculous hyperbole, but simply because Dowson offers more options from the bench.

It is not so long ago that Saints had a sub's bench so bare it posed as a Playboy centrefold, but Mallinder has confounded the critics who said his time at Sale was characterised by first XV-only thinking by developing true strength-in-depth throughout the squad. A bench including Lawes, Diggin, Dowson, and Mayor could offer the sort of impact only previously witnessed when Boris Yeltsin hit the deck after a week on the vodka.

One of the biggest problems the Saints will have to contend with will be their own kit. It may not be the cursed white shirts, but Saints' specially commissioned Heineken Cup shirt is a sheer act of wanton vandalism against everything the club should stand for. What on Earth were the design team at Rhino thinking to come up with a shirt so offensive even a Moldovan prostitute wouldn't wear one?

Northampton Saints		Munster Rugby

Ben Foden	15	Felix Jones
Chris Ashton	14	Doug Howlett
Jon Clarke	13	Lifeimi Mafi
James Downey	12	Jean de Villiers
Bruce Reihana	11	Ian Dowling
Shane Geraghty	10	Ronan O'Fu Gara
Lee Wilson	9	Tomas O'Leary
Soane Tonga'uiha	1	Marcus Horan
Dylan Hartley (c)	2	Jerry Flannery
Santiago Bonorino	3	Tony Buckley
Juandre Kruger	4	Paul O'Connell (c)
Ignacio Fernandez Lobbe	5	Donncha O'Callaghan
Neil Best	6	Donncha Ryan
Scott Gray	7	David Wallace
Roger Wilson	8	Denis Leamy

The matchday experience

So, for those travelling to the game, what can you expect?

Have you ever wondered what it's like to be a SAracens fan? Well, start pronouncing every word like the letter E is the only vowel to have ever existed as on Saturday you will be able to travel to a real rugby ground which will be full to bursting with Real Rugby Fansô. Thanks to some entrepreneurial exploitation, Munster supporters have snaffled up Saints' Associated Memberships, and therefore tickets, meaning there should be several thousand doubtless wet-throated Munster supporters at Franklin's Gardens for the fixture. I don't begrudge them this at all, but either our club is nonchalantly flicking two fingers at its fans, or the only lesson they learnt from last year's ECC semi-final was not to let opposition fans drink free beer in our car parks.

Sky's cameras will be crowding around the red-shirted throngs like teenage boys who have just found a ripped and soggy page of Razzle next to a litter bin, but there will not be so many of them that Saints fans will not be able to out sing them. Anyone at the game has the duty to ensure that Wendys drown out the Munster support suffocating through the emotion of the Fields of Athenry (a song, of course, about Connacht, a province for which almost no-one in Irish rugby has ever shed a tear) like the SAracens horns were silenced in the last home European fixture. Saints fans also have a duty to buy a drink for the first person in a red shirt you meet before and after the match, but for 80 minutes on Saturday they must be condemned to silence so total that they are unable to even pass around the latest scores from the Liverpool game amongst themselves.

(If you can also drown out the idiot who sat behind me in B block in the one game I've been to at Franklins' in the last decade who chose to demonstrate his in-depth rugby knowledge by bellowing the Christian names of Saints' players followed by 'you idiot' at the top of his voice for the entire match, that would be an added bonus.)

This will be Munster fans' first chance to visit Northampton. For any reading this: if you step out of the train station to a scene so dour, grey and miserable that you are at first convinced you have accidentally arrived in Scotland, then you are in the right place.

From the station or the nearby Ibis Hotel, it is a 10 to 15-minute walk to the stadium, but allow yourself longer to stop off at the three rugby-colours-friendly pubs along the way - The Thomas a Becket, The Foundrymans Arms, and the St. James WMC - in all of which you will find Saints fans and handshakes. For any travelling support staying at the Ibis, a beer there is going to cost you more than James Haskell's Parisian pay rise, so you might want to check out the Malt Shovel on Bridge Street for real ales before returning for the night.

Personally, I'm going to be in Outer Mongolia when the match is played, so if anyone knows of an Ulaanbaatar ger which screens rugby at 01:00 on a Sunday morning, please let me know!

The prediction

Pool 1 is going to be so tight that a loss this weekend means our Heineken campaign will be over before it has begun. Priority #1 is securing the win and #2 is making sure it's by more than seven points. Not even David Lynch could come up with a script so bizarre it sees Northampton getting a try bonus, but these first two goals are fundamental and achievable. The Munster support needs to be silenced and silenced early, and the Saints need to go about making themselves more unpopular in Limerick than sipping Pimm's in Union Jack boxer shorts.

Saints haven't played well for both halves of a game yet this year, and they need to put together 80 minutes of composed, controlled, in-your-face rugby.

So firmly are Mallinder's feet on the ground that he goes through several pairs of Church's a week, but he will know the enormity of the task facing his team. Ahead of the game, he told the press "last year we were good at home and that helped," like it was the greatest insight in the history of humanity. But Franklin's Gardens is a fortress and even if it's Europe's number one-ranked team which has been purpose-built for this competition who are calling, they need to be repelled like any notion of free-thought is on Sky's coverage.

Whenever Mallinder is interviewed, he always gives so little away that I struggle to imagine him anywhere other than a secretive underground lair in a volcano sitting in a black leather chair stroking a white cat and planning world domination. Saints can set down a huge marker this weekend and show just how far they have come in two years. I'm backing them to do just that and achieve the first step in the teams' attempts to bring those plans to fruition.

Saints 20 - Munster 12

The links

*** For Munster fans wishing to know about eating, drinking and other traditional Northamptonian delights, click here.

*** For a day trip out of town to somewhere that actually is as horrific as the scare stories would have you believe Limerick is after dark, click here.

*** To find out who is ultimately behind Northampton's return to top-level European rugby, click here.

News: Saints v Munster HC Preview

Posted by: ComeOnYouSaints.com (IP Logged)

Date: 09/10/2009 01:26

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