In the spring of 2016, Paul O’Connell and his family arrived in France to stay for nine days with their friends, the Prendergasts from Limerick. It reached public notice by a couple of simple steps: at the time Mike Prendergast was the backs coach at Grenoble and O’Connell spent some of his holiday accompanying his friend to work. On top of that, he’s hard to hide.
Photographs appeared in the press of O’Connell looming like a periscope over a Grenoble scrum, and because the club had a vacancy for a forwards coach, a match was proposed in the media. The speculation was harmless and groundless. Now? O’Connell is the Ireland forwards coach, having made a transformative impact in his first year in the role; Prendergast is the attack coach at Racing 92, one of the biggest clubs in France.
Whatever paths they followed, though, their roots would always be entangled: they signed professional contracts for Munster within days of each other, having emerged together on a Junior Cup winning team with Young Munster. Whatever else they achieved in their careers, wherever that success might come, Munster was in their blood.
In the long run, though, what would that mean? Not just for them, but for Ronan O’Gara, the director of rugby at La Rochelle, and his forwards coach, Donnacha Ryan; for James Coughlan at Toulon; for Denis Leamy at Leinster; for Mossy Lawler at Connacht; for Jerry Flannery at Harlequins; for Felix Jones with South Africa?
Among Munster supporters there would be a romantic assumption that some of them would eventually come back. That the pull of Munster would, ultimately, be irresistible. That they would answer a need. It is now ten years since Munster won a trophy. After years of being damned as a semi-final team in the Heineken Champions Cup, Munster failed to even reach the last eight in the past two seasons. Is it a crisis yet?
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In his terrific column in the Irish Examiner, Ronan O’Gara never ducks a question. Back in April, a week after Munster lost the Guinness Pro14 final to an understrength Leinster team, and a day before they were eliminated from the Champions Cup by Toulouse in Thomond Park, he addressed some of the stuff that has been troubling Munster’s supporters for ages.
“People who are quite measured were aghast at what they saw last Saturday in the Pro14 final,” he wrote, “and left wondering what is going on at Munster. As an ex-player, you’d be worried about the club now, and whether they are losing their identity. What do Munster stand for now?
“The irony is that Paulie [Paul O’Connell] is now coaching the Irish forwards, when the club is crying out for someone like him. And of course, I hear the voices saying, ‘If Rog is so bothered, why isn’t he back here doing something about it?’ To which one might reply that I’m on my own career path and I don’t have any role in solving Munster’s problems. Indeed, I may never have.”
There is no guarantee that any of them will return. Would it be too much of a risk? Would it disturb the path they’re already on? Take the colony of former Munster players building careers in France. Bernard Jackman, the former Leinster and Ireland hooker, spent five seasons at Grenoble, the last of them as head coach. For a team with their resources fending off relegation was a grinding struggle, but the vibrancy of the league was intoxicating.
“I’ve coached in the Pro14 as well [with Dragons],” he says, “but as a place to work the Top 14 is more enjoyable. Until you’re actually in it, it’s hard to fathom how diverse and intense it is, and how much the Top 14 matters to French rugby people. The lads who are there, they’re all testing themselves in a very difficult environment. They’re going to be better coaches for the experience of getting out of Ireland.”
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Some of the numbers are eye-watering. Only three teams in this year’s Top 14 has a budget of less than €20 million; five of them have budgets in excess of €30 million. Stade Francais are touching €40 million. When Toulon targeted the Springboks wing Cheslin Kolbe, they had the wherewithal to pay €1.8 million to release him from the final two years of his contract with Toulouse. Which of the Irish provinces could contemplate such a move?
With that kind of money, though, comes pressure. Coughlan was less than three months in Toulon when the head coach, Patrice Collazo, was sacked. In the summer, Coughlan had been released by Brive as defence coach after just one season in the job. He tells a story about a message he received at the beginning of his coaching career from Damian Mednis, an Australian S&C coach he knew in Munster years ago. “James,” the message read, “remember, in coaching you rent a house, you don’t buy.”
Set against that volatility, though, is the variety of opportunities: Coughlan is at his fourth French club in a coaching capacity and so is Prendergast. In other seasons, with Grenoble and Oyonnax, Prendergast was fighting relegation battles, and even in the year he spent with Stade Francais, they were toiling in the bottom half of the table. To recruit him as their attack coach, though, Racing could see beyond all that.
With Stephen Larkham leaving at end of the season O’Gara argued strongly last week that Prendergast should be on Munster’s radar. In the next breath, though, O’Gara articulated the reasons why a role with Munster might not tempt Prendergast yet.
“At this stage, the environment might be more important to him than a job title . . . dealing with the right people in the right set-up.” On top of that, he wondered which team was closer to winning a Champions Cup at the moment, Racing or Munster? He didn’t give an answer but it sounded like a rhetorical question.
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None of the four front-line coaches in the province comes from the Munster gene pool. The last time that all of Munster’s coaches were homegrown was in 2016, Anthony Foley’s final season as head coach. Has a critical balance been lost?
Johann van Graan was on hand when Rassie Erasmus left halfway through the 2017-18 season and Munster needed stability. Are they in a better position now, four years later? No. Van Graan has many fine qualities, but he has never been characterised as inspirational or charismatic. He hasn’t been a game changer.
Larkham’s arrival as senior coach generated that kind of hope, but he will leave much too soon and return to Australia in the summer.
Van Graan has been linked with a move to Bath at the end of this season, and if he goes, what then? O’Connell is surely embedded with Ireland until the 2023 World Cup, by which time he may be Andy Farrell’s most likely successor as the country’s head coach.
O’Gara is getting his arms around a huge challenge at La Rochelle and a massive opportunity. Prendergast is still climbing, in a different league.
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Munster needs two from that three, in any permutation. Right now, it’s only a fantasy.
