There is a mantra that the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers, Vince Lombardi, would tell his players. “Get fired with enthusiasm, or, get fired ... with enthusiasm.”
Positive energy is not a new age concept. Since David took down Goliath, the cliche that who wants it the most wins mostly holds true.
Last week at Croke Park, Munster wanted to win more than Leinster.
Aggressive body language and positive energy radiated from the men in red. None of these qualities requires skill. Rugby is a sport where the intangibles count and Munster’s traditional aggression was oozing from their players.
Clayton McMillan has Munster playing a limited game plan with great energy. As military tacticians maintain, a simple plan executed with total commitment is far more effective than a complex plan implemented without enthusiasm.
Munster’s win is also a blessing for Andy Farrell. The game in Croke Park showed that the Leinster players he has selected in his squad to face New Zealand next week do not currently have the right mindset.
Without a total mental reset from several of his senior players, the scoreboard at Soldier Field in Chicago will tick over for New Zealand at a rate not seen since the great Chicago Bears running back Walter ‘Sweetness’ Payton broke records in the 1980s.
After supplying so many players to the Lions tour in the summer, the start of this season was always going to be exceptionally difficult for Leinster. The worry for Leo Cullen is that while championships are not won in October, they can be lost.
Once again, Leinster’s defensive system let them down. At every defensive scrum and lineout, Leinster offer the attacking team an unbelievable amount of space.
Their entire defensive system is based on stopping the attacking team from getting possession to their inside centre. The problem for Leinster is if that fails, and it often did, they had no plan B.
Nine minutes into the first half, five metres from Leinster’s try line, as Munster freed the ball from a mauled lineout, 14 Leinster defenders were crammed into a 25-metre channel on the left hand side of the pitch. Tommy O’Brien, their right winger, was the sole defender forced to cover two thirds of the width of his try line. In one of Jack Crowley’s only blemishes, he did not get his pass away to one of four unmarked Munster backs.
Behind a hard working and committed pack, Crowley put in an excellent shift, exploiting all of Leinster’s defensive weaknesses. His short kicking game attacked the acres of space that Leinster leave with the positioning of their fullback and wingers.
If Leinster keep defending in this manner, teams will do their homework – as Munster did – and design plays to get through such an all-or-nothing system.
Competition is the driver of performance, and Munster just tossed a can of petrol on to the fire of interprovincial animosity. The blood-deep rivalry between Munster and Leinster has been the driving force behind the rise of Irish rugby in the professional era. Munster’s emphatic victory at Croke Park is a good thing for Irish rugby and for Ireland.
Leinster have now copped several nicely timed, early season, hard, left jabs right on their nose and are languishing among teams in the URC table that they have treated as speed bumps in the past.
How they respond in December will determine their season. For so long, the hunter, Munster, have now become the hunted. The Christmas rematch in Limerick will be a belter.
Farrell and his staff have a few days to find the switch that can drastically adjust the mindset of many senior players inside his Leinster-heavy Irish squad.
The question is not only can Farrell lift his players’ mindset to the levels required to challenge the Kiwis, but are the ageing players, who have been the backbone of his Irish and Lions teams, capable of the mental recovery required so soon after the exertions of the Lions tour?
Here, let me beseech you to forget the falsehoods that were being peddled last year that New Zealand have lost their aura. That theory was widely bought into by Irish supporters last November but evaporated at the Aviva as New Zealand trounced Ireland.
This is not a New Zealand team that can be compared to the great 2015 World Cup group, when Richie McCaw, Dan Carter and Sonny Bill Williams were in their pomp. New Zealand teams are like hugs from your mum. There is no such thing as a bad one, but some are better than others.
Great teams, like the World Cup winners of 2015, shimmer like a star before fading into the ether of memory. Leinster and Ireland are no different.
Performances like last Saturday remind us that Leinster and Ireland have several key players who are ageing. At Croke Park, we witnessed the first signs that members of this wonderful generation of Leinster and Irish players are at the beginning of their end.
That does not mean that Leinster and Ireland are not capable of some great, even trophy-lifting, performances this season. They are not finished just yet. However, the reality is that Father Time eventually runs down even the fastest and strongest. Finally, they all come crashing to the turf.
The exact moment of that fall is impossible to predict. Some last much longer than anyone could have expected. Others are gone far too early. Usually, in rugby, it is the mind that is the first to fail. The split-second hesitation of total commitment because of the natural instinct of self-preservation seeps into the old warrior’s mind.
Perhaps we glimpsed brief seconds of this at Croke Park.
Across November, Ireland have an outstanding series of matches that will test the mindset and motivation of every player involved. What those matches will expose will be fascinating to watch.
The only thing I can guarantee is that Father Time has never missed a tackle. He is a ruthless defender. And he is always on the hunt.
