David Corkery on rugby: Delay in agreeing new Irish captain’s contract laughable

YET, another week of off-field news grabbing all the rugby headlines.

As expected, Peter O’Mahony was named Irish captain for the Six Nations and at the same time, he is still waiting to see if the IRFU or Munster will offer him a contract when his current one expires at the end of this season.

This is a completely laughable situation and you would have to agree that only in Ireland would this be allowed to happen.

While the IRFU might have got a lot of things right with regards to structures and processes, their ideology of treating players with respect and dignity is still stuck in the prehistoric ages.

I’m sure there is a certain level of gamesmanship going on between O’Mahony’s agent and the IRFU’s director of rugby David Humphreys. Yet to see O’Mahony showcased as captain of the national team on one side of the newspaper, while on the other you read about how the man is still unsure about his immediate future is something you’d see scripted by D’Unbelievables.

I would firmly expect that anyone named on Andy Farrell’s Six Nations squad will have their contract talks fully completed before a ball is kicked in the competition.

To be successful on the field a player’s mind needs to be 100% focused on the game and the last thing he or she needs to have hanging over them is their future.

With regards to the 34-man squad, I was really disappointed that there were no uncapped players named albeit, Oli Jager, Tom Ahern, and Sam Prendergast were named as training panellists.

The other two headlines grabbing news that we saw in recent days were that Farrell was confirmed as head coach for the Lions tour to Australia and that the shining star of Welsh rugby, Louis Rees-Zammit, has decided to turn his back on rugby union in a bid to pursue an NFL career.

The confirmation of Farrell’s appointment was no shock and you would have to think that this is great news for the hopefuls who wear the green jersey. It also means that Peter O’Mahony may well be in the running for the captaincy.

If he is good enough to captain his country, then he should easily be good enough to captain the Lions or at a very minimum be named on the touring panel.

The Rees-Zammit situation is a strange one, and while we wish him all the best, the difference between playing American football and playing rugby is akin to climbing Patrick’s Hill successfully and thinking that Mount Everest will pose a similar kind of challenge.

The only similarity between the two sports is the shape of the ball, and to me it seems that Rees-Zammit is starting to think like his fellow countryman Gavin Henson and Englishman Danny Cipriani.

Two players who had all the skill and ability in the world but were dazzled in the spotlights of stardom and ended up with very little to show for their exploits.

EPIC

Last week Munster gifted us with the kind of performance that has been missing for many a year and as a result they have put themselves firmly back in the driving seat of rugby’s greatest club competition.

It was almost like someone had turned the clock back to 2006 and 2008 when traveling to the strongholds of French and English rugby posed little fear for Munster.

Considering their brutal start to this year’s European Champions Cup it was hard to see how Graham Rowntree’s men were going to recover, but only as Munster can do, they somehow gathered the wagons, had a few serious open and honest meetings and sorted themselves out.

I would think Rowntree would have bitten the hand off you if you had offered him a one-point win before the game, so to have come away from the fortress that Toulon call Stade Felix Mayoln with a try-scoring bonus point victory is something he could have only dreamt about.

As a coach, one the most important things to have on your side is that you are not depending on other teams to do you a favour and the sword you live and die by is the one you yield yourself.

As a result of last week’s victory, Munster now find themselves in third spot in their pool, and with four teams to make it to the next round, they are now masters of their own destiny.

Munster’s opponents in this final pool game are English side Northampton Saints who have already cemented their ticket to the next round. However, if they stay top of the pool they would have a home quarter-final should they make it that far, so they still have a lot to play for.

Promoting themselves from third to second would give Munster a home draw in the next stage, but there is little hope of that as I would expect Exeter to easily overcome Bayonne to stay second.

The most important thing for Rowntree and his players now is that they continue where they left off last week and show a level of consistency where they are not taking one step forward and two back.