WHEN MUNSTER hosted South Africa A in front of 41,000 people in Cork in the second week of November, the portents of doom around the province were inescapable. This was a local team that had won just two of their first seven games in the United Rugby Championship; a side that would go up against the gnarled tourists stripped of seasoned internationals, so no Peter O’Mahony and no Tadhg Beirne, no Conor Murray and no Joey Carbery, no Keith Earls and no Andrew Conway and, of course, no RG Snyman, Munster’s lesser-spotted Springbok, who has spent more time on the treatment table than the training ground since arriving in Munster two years ago.
The anxiety around the province’s results was obvious. Yes, the club was rebuilding on a platform of youth. Yes again, some of the rugby they’d been playing under Graham Rowntree was encouraging and light years ahead of the muck routinely served up by his predecessor Johann van Graan in terms of ambition
