Not alone is this not a particularly opportune time to be the Munster head coach, it isn't an especially rewarding time to be their captain.
Increasingly CJ Stander appears to be one of the few still capable of grasping a game by the horns. That is especially so when the tide turns against a mentally brittle team. A player who admits to having been brought to tears by Paul O’Connell’s inspirational words, CJ Stander is as frustrated as the coaches at Munster’s tame European exit.
“Being out of Europe again is tough. I normally go home and you want to leave it on the pitch, but it’s hard to do that because it’s my job and I want to perform and make the jersey, the supporters, proud. It’s been a tough few weeks for me personally and other people also.”
In his fourth season with Munster, this defeat hurt the most. “Yeah, especially as captain. It’s disappointing, that’s the word. I know what the boys can do, we train very hard and we get to games and don’t put it out on the field.
Dead rubber games
“Now it’s dead rubber games from here,” he added, turning his thoughts to next week’s return game with Stade in Limerick. “The boys need to step up next week and show what the jersey means. That’s important.”
The number eight showed what he could do with a couple of carries off stable scrums in the second quarter, but it when the pack eventually retreated under Stade’s concerted eight-man pressure, it did untold damage on the scoreboard, as well as mentally. It’s hard to see how the Munster scrum can change that in a week.
“You need to front up,” said Stander. “That’s the thing we’ll talk about this week, we can’t scrum backwards in a red jersey. I don’t think that’s happened in a long time anyway. We need to control that, because a guy like Morné [Steyn] will just kick three, six, nine points and puts them in the corners. You can’t give him that, because we worked hard to get there and then they just scrum us five metres away and then kick us back into our half. It’s tough to get back there again.”
Stander was not without blame himself, having missed the initial attempted tackle on Sekou Macalou at the start of the flanker's stunning try from half-way. He repeatedly referred to his team's poor decision-making, which also has to include himself.
When it was suggested to him that the team was short of confidence, he said: “I wouldn’t say that, it’s decision-making. I wouldn’t say it’s panic, but guys are trying to play in the wrong areas. We need to put the ball in the right area and keep it there, because they were a man down. In fairness to them, they used the ball and scored the tries with 14 men. What a team.”
Opportunity knocked
At half-time, they knew opportunity knocked against 14 men. “We talked about it, we said to ourselves, ‘we have to go out there and pick up the pace’, but we didn’t do that. We were walking to lineouts.”
By contrast, there wasn’t much said in the visiting dressing-room afterwards. “Everyone’s disappointed about letting the jersey down, the supporters. People came over here to watch the game, they still support us. You want to go into Europe and get to a quarter-final and go on from there. We didn’t do that this year again, it’s disappointing. It’s bad.”
Stander admitted the players had to take a large portion of the responsibility. “The coaches give us everything we need, all the tools we need to perform and we don’t give it back to them and that’s disappointing. They’re great coaches . . . they’re passionate about the game and they drive us. It’s disappointing to let them down, because I can see how much it hurts them. I know how much it hurts me as the captain.”
