When you are a head coach needing to prove yourself as the excuses run out and the demands for success intensify, the last thing you need is to go into the season with a lengthy injury list. That, however, is exactly where Alan Solomons, the man in charge of Edinburgh, finds himself as the club launch their season against Munster at Thomond Park tonight.
He is reasonably optimistic that by the end of the month, the majority of the walking wounded will be back in action, with only David Denton and Matt Scott, the Scotland No 8 and centre respectively, likely to be long-term absentees, but he knows that in the key opening fixtures he is going to be without a number of first-choice players.
The list is headed by Mike Coman, the captain, who missed all of Edinburgh’s pre-season games and is being eased back via the bench, while Grant Gilchrist, his deputy, will not be available until the end of the month. Anton Bresler, the biggest summer signing, is another who is nearly, but not quite, ready, along with Grayson Hart, the scrum half capped by Scotland in the summer, who has been sent to get match fit playing for Gala after recovering from an elbow problem.
That last decision allows 23-year-old Sean Kennedy to fulfil a lifetime ambition and play his first game at Thomond Park, his field of dreams when he was a boy in Limerick. “When I was growing up, Munster were getting to the Heineken Cup final in Cardiff and there are still a few of those guys playing now,” he said.
“Anthony Foley [now the Munster head coach] was the main man for them then, and Ronan O’Gara, Peter Stringer were pulling the strings. I played mini tournaments and the like on the back pitches there but never on the main one. As a kid I would have loved to play for Munster, so playing against them now is just as good. I’m really excited about playing there, I used to go to loads of games”
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Kennedy was born in Scotland but his family moved back to his father’s home town soon after and stayed there until he was a teenager, when they came back to Scotland. He did most of his secondary schooling in Alloa, joined Stirling County, came up through the Scottish age-grade system and is tied to Scotland after winning caps at Sevens.
“A lot of my family over there are coming to the game — they have all made it clear that they will be cheering for Munster, though. It’s a win-win for them, I suppose,” he said.
The competition at scrum half is arguably the most intense of any position in the squad with Hart likely to be available next week and Sam Hidalgo-Clyne earning rave reviews for his showing in the pre-season matches, so Kennedy knows he needs to perform to keep getting chances.
Solomons explained his decision to start with Kennedy on tactical grounds, reasoning that with Foley at the helm, born and bred in Munster and with more than 200 games for the province under his belt, the Irish are likely to revert to a style closer to their traditional forward-orientated, physical approach than has been the case for he past couple of seasons. “We have three excellent scrum halves but for this particular game we felt it was better to have Sean starting and Sam coming off the bench,” he said.
In many ways it is the ideal match for Solomons to see how the summer’s training has gone. He spent a good part of last season worried that there was not enough physicality in the side, which he joined only two weeks before the campaign started. Now, having had the players in for a brutal summer of strength and fitness work, he can at last see how effective it has all been.
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“This is a long season but we have better strength in depth than we have had in the past, and it is good to see some of our players slowly coming back from injury,” he added. “The players know that Munster at Thomond Park are no easy proposition and we need to get our performance right.”
Munster are also missing players through injury, while the Irish national side are keeping others back to complete their recovery from the summer tour. They have something of a crisis at hooker, where their top three choices are all injured, but on their own patch they are never less than formidable.
Munster: R O’Mahony; A Conway, J Murphy, A Smith, S Zebo; I Keatley, D Williams; J Ryan, K O’Byrne, BJ Botha, D O’Callaghan, B Holland, CJ Stander, S Dougall, S Buckley. Replacements: D Casey, A Cotter, S Archer, D Foley, T O’Donnell, C Sheridan, J Holland, I Dineen.
Edinburgh: J Cuthbert; D Fife, S Beard, A Strauss, T Visser; G Tonks, S Kennedy; A Dickinson, R Ford, J Andress, F McKenzie, O Atkins, T Leonardi, H Watson, C Du Preez. Replacements: J Hilterbrand, R Sutherland, WP Nel, B Toolis, M Coman, S Hidalgo-Clyne, N McLennan,
P Burleigh.
Referee: L Hodges (Wal) TV: BBC Alba, 7.30pm.
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