IRELAND’S second Grand Slam — the first achieved in 1948 — has its origins far further back than the opening-weekend win against France. Further indeed than the prescient decision to replace Eddie O’Sullivan with the shrewdest coach the nation has produced in living memory.
No, Brian O’Driscoll and his triumphant colleagues owe a huge debt to a different tournament, the parvenu of European rugby championships. The Heineken Cup is the competition that set Ireland en route to the 2009 Grand Slam.
It was the Heineken Cup that galvanized Irish rugby in a way that the old parochial Munster and Leinster clubs could not. For all the charms of a few pints in Garryowen, Ballymena or Blackrock, it needed a surge of something special to lift Ireland from the spirited (in every possible sense in my Five Nations experiences in Dublin) masters of the up and under and at the English to Grand Slammers.
And that something special, for all that Dublin and Ulster supporters will hate it being said, is Munster. The magic province of the Irish game, the heartlands of the hard man, the home of the mythic conquerors of the All Blacks in the days of Tony Ward. Munster restored what Irish rugby had lacked for so long, the belief in its own powers.
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Munster’s champions laid platform for Declan Kidney’s men
Munster’s champions laid platform for Declan Kidney’s men
