Munster boss Costello: 'You’d back Jack Crowley to bounce back from anything'
Crowley Game Back: munster’s Bounce Sheridan Jack Dejected picture: The ©inpho/dan After
Such is the focus placed on the Munster number 10 jersey that on a night of mounting injuries, multiple errors and frequent penalties across the team, it was Jack Crowley’s poor performance grabbing the attention in Friday’s 16-14 Champions Cup defeat.
The fly-half was not the only guilty party as Munster failed to take advantage of three Castres yellow cards, conceded a sloppy try from the front of an opposition lineout for the second week in a row and was able to offer only the meekest resistance to heavyweight French Top 14 scrum at Stade Pierre Fabre.
Yet it was Crowley’s mis-steps which were amplified loudest, the curse of being in the most pivotal of positions, and not least when being beaten by the odds of a long penalty kick to touch at the death that tried just too hard to milk an extra metre or two of territory for his pack.
Not a month goes by when it seems the 24-year-old is not required to tap into his renowned mental strength and respond with a performance to restore faith among the wider rugby public that this is a playmaker of rare talent. He did it in an Ireland jersey during November’s Autumn Nations Series having lost the number 10 jersey to Sam Prendergast with an excellent cameo to see out victory over Australia and on Friday in southern France, Munster interim head coach Ian Costello underlined his trust in his fly-half as the dust was settling on this round-two pool defeat and backed the Corkman to once again prove the doubters wrong.
“You’d back Jack to bounce back from anything,” Costello said. “He’s a quality player, a quality bloke, hugely resilient as we’ve seen repeatedly in the past. Jack will be in the mix over the next couple of weeks, he’ll have to get a rest at some point, but as always we would expect Jack to bounce back.”
Despite an IRFU-enforced rest week approaching for all of Ireland’s frontline internationals, Crowley will be eager to get an instant opportunity to go again this Friday night when Munster park a European campaign that has now garnered six points thanks to the losing bonus point at Castres from the opening two rounds and return to the business of climbing the URC table.
They visit an Ulster side at an even lower ebb following consecutive hammerings by Toulouse and Bordeaux-Bègles but Costello does not want the Castres defeat to sidetrack his efforts to rebuild Munster form following a poor first six weeks of the season prior to Graham Rowntree’s departure by mutual consent at the end of October.
“With every player it’s about trust and faith in them. They’ll have good days and they’ll have bad days. We’ve a huge amount of trust in the squad, Jack and all the others, we’ve just got to make sure that when we come back in on Monday again we’re building on a really good five or six weeks that we’ve had.
“This is a bump in the road. We’ve got to look at elements of our performance and be really honest about it, and some parts of it weren’t good enough. But be honest and get on with it on Monday.”
Whether that last-ditch failure to find touch will feature in that review remains to be seen with Costello emphasising his trust in Crowley’s decision-making and kick execution, the interim boss also pointing to an earlier example the fly-half missing touch when Castres got over the line at the opposite end but were denied a try when Brian Gleeson held up his opposite No.8 Abraham Papali’i.
“Look, as long as he’s being decisive, he commits and he goes for it, and if he misses, he misses, I’d rather that if some miss then they miss going for it.
“It would have put the team in a very good position for a last opportunity. Unfortunately the kick was outside range and, look, he went for every inch out of that and as long as he was committing to it, we’ll back him.”
Munster’s problems certainly extended beyond their fly-half and the decision by Costello to make six changes from the side which earned an opening bonus-point win over Stade Francais the previous Saturday, with Shane Daly and Gavin Coombes among those rested in Castres, seemed to be among them. Yet the interim head coach pointed to the impacts made by incoming players, not least double try scorer John Hodnett and No.8 Gleeson, making his first Champions Cup start, and insisted squad rotation with back-to-back Christmas derbies on the horizon before a resumption of pool play.
"I suppose a six-day turnaround and travel to France would be the primary reason. A lot of guys have played back-to-back games and it's about trusting our squad.
"Some guys didn't play the last two games, like John Hodnett came off the bench and was outstanding tonight, came in fresh. And it's about freshness and it's about trusting the squad and generating a squad depth.
"So, wanting to win these games first and foremost but also looking at the block we have of six massive games in a row and we're not in the position we'd like to be in the URC and it's very hard to weight one over the other.
"We know there's Irish players that will come out over the next few weeks so Gavin, for example, playing really well, we'll freshen him up and come back in again next week."