JOE columnist Jerry Flannery looks forward to another big Leinster-Munster showdown in the Magners League, when he hopes to be fit enough to play a part.
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We’re up against Leinster again on Saturday night in the semi-finals of the Magners League and that’s one everyone’s looking forward to.
We know each other very well and that’s probably why the games are generally so closely contested. We’re friends with these guys, we play with them for the national side but there’s no doubt there’s a big rivalry there as well. It’s like playing football against your mates – you never want to let him get one up on you.
Whenever Ireland didn’t perform well people looked for reasons and they thought it must be because the Munster and Leinster lads don’t get on
People have made a lot of the Munster/Leinster divide in the Ireland squad over the last few years. Whenever the team didn’t perform well people looked for reasons and they thought it must be because the Munster and Leinster lads don’t get on. But that’s not the case. I’ve a lot of really good mates in the Leinster team.
It’s easy, when you’re away with the Irish team, to just hang around with your room-mate or whatever. I room with Tomás O’Leary but you have to make an effort to get to know the other lads and have the craic with them. With Ireland I knock about with Tommy Bowe a good bit, and Cian Healy is a good lad as well.
Cian Healy (right) and Jerry Flannery during an Ireland training session last November
In relation to the Ireland team, the tussle between Cian and Marcus Horan is going to be interesting now that Marcus is back fit. Marcus has been injured and Cian has stepped up and been consistent all year. He might have been taken off after 30 minutes against Toulouse but it just shows the measure of what a strong player and character he is by coming back and being Man of the Match against Edinburgh.
RDS noise
There’s always a really good atmosphere at the RDS. The Leinster crowd really get behind them and it’s always very loud, very vocal up there. Leinster will be looking forward to that but it won’t affect us either – you want to play in front of crowds like that.
Hopefully I’ll be involved. I picked up a calf injury against Biarritz and missed the game against Cardiff at the weekend.
I probably won’t train today (Tuesday) with the rest of the team. I’ll go for a run on my own and see how it reacts. If that goes okay, I could be back in later in the week so it’s promising enough for Saturday night.
The tear seems to have healed so there’s probably a small bit of scar tissue now, but hopefully it won’t be enough to keep me out of Saturday’s game.
Play-offs a good move
Looking back at last weekend, the fact that play-offs had been introduced to the Magners League kept a lot of excitement in it until the last day.
Last season it petered out a bit because we had won the league with a few games to go. Before this season, with the way the Magners League is structured – games taking place during the Autumn internationals and Six Nations – teams with a lot of international players would have been penalised in a way because they would have lost a lot of top players for part of the season and not had a chance to catch up.
The play-offs have evened everything up a bit more because those teams still have a chance over the course of a whole season.
From a sponsors’ point of view, too, play-offs make perfect sense. People are going to keep tuning in which makes the whole thing more attractive commercially.
Winning aim
The Magners League might not be as prestigious as the Heineken Cup but it’s still something we’d love to win again. The format of the season means there are a couple of different peaks: the Heineken Cup at the start of the season leads into the Autumn internationals, and then after Christmas the Heineken Cup leads into the Six Nations.
The Magners maybe suffers a bit by comparison but it’s still a great thing to win. Last year, when we lost to Leinster in the Heineken Cup semi-finals it was a massive disappointment but personally I didn’t feel as low after that as after Biarritz last week, and that’s probably down to the fact that we were on our way to the Magners League title – we had still won an awful lot of games so we still had a sense of self worth.
But this season has been inconsistent and after losing to Biarritz we started asking ourselves questions about where we’re going, saying ‘Jesus, we’re not at the races this year at all’. This weekend is the perfect chance to put that behind us, and we’ll be giving it everything to come out on top.
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