Prior to Saturday’s match at Croke Park against Leinster, the head coach of Munster is juggling a long list of injuries.
Rugby returns to Croke Park THIS WEEKEND, and Munster head coach Graham Rowntree’s encounter with Leinster at the URC will mark his first visit to the GAA’s home field.
A significant portion of many of his players’ childhoods was spent at the stadium. As they get ready to play their fiercest opponents on the pitch this weekend—for which more than 75,000 tickets have already been sold—the team gathered yesterday at their training facility in Limerick and shared anecdotes about their fondest memories of Croke Park.
Rowntree led the talk as an interested observer, and he acknowledges that the event had a lasting impression.
“I had some knowledge of the past. During these occasions, I occasionally keep my head down for apparent reasons.
Munster has had an incredible amount of injury problems thus early in the season; among the walking wounded are Thaakir Abrahams, Shane Daly, Billy Burns, and Rudhán Quinn. However, Tom Ahern, Alex Nankivell, and Mike Haley are all in the mix to return this weekend.
Undoubtedly, some of those injuries—like Daly’s unfortunate fall onto his elbow against Zebre—have happened, but Rowntree says the province has investigated possible causes, including how they have been preparing the players, after dealing with a similarly challenging injury list during the Christmas break last season.
We, myself included, schedule our workouts down to the minute, deciding who will switch out and how many kick-chases Thaakir Abrahams will undertake this week before moving on to the next person for high-speed running or another kick-chase.
You have to set a mileage limit for these racehorses. We’ve done a thorough analysis of the data and even changed a few things related to training today; we’ll see if that solves the problem or not, but there’s no justification for overtraining the boys. There is no correlation. It’s not excessive exercise.
“However, you have exceptionally skilled athletes… Their size is slender, and they have no flesh on them. Honestly, you can panic and examine every crevice when things break down, but I trust the staff here,
That keeps going. Occasionally, to a lesser extent, if you observe how they never take a step off. Now that they’re upright again, they’re challenging the ruck and their work rate.
“I can see Tyler’s influence on some of their plays and phase attacks. They perform admirably after launch. They’re pretty good, so you don’t want to give them a tonne of lineouts.
“It all boils down to penalty access; they adore mauls and escaping them.” They have excellent strategies for testing your mettle in the lineout and outside centre channel. Thus, it will be really difficult.
A hurdle that Rowntree is sure his group can overcome.
“If you’re not going to prepare yourselves at Croke Park for this,
