Irish spirit crushes Gloucester's ambitions

Sometimes, professional rugby looks like a failure waiting to happen. In the hours before this stupendous occasion, the Irish newspapers were full of political bile – warnings of an imminent strike by the players of Connacht, of marches in Dublin by the good sporting folk of Galway and Athlone in protest at plans to downsize the domestic game and throw dozens of honest employees out of a job – and the atmosphere in the bars of Limerick was unusually flat and gloomy. At which point, the Gods granted us a contest so exhilarating that it left 14,000 people secure in the knowledge that rugby cannot possibly fail, that it is far too good not to work.

Actually, it was not a true contest at all: Gloucester tackled – heavens, how the likes of Jake Boer and Olivier Azam tackled – but as Ronan O'Gara, Munster's outside-half, asserted afterwards, the West Countrymen were shot to pieces after a quarter of an hour. It was more like theatre in its purest form; drama on an operatic scale. The Irishmen knew the script, understood precisely what they had to do to claim a place in the knock-out stage of the Heineken Cup against ridiculous odds, and they inched their way slowly, agonisingly towards their goal. When the denouement finally arrived – in the very last minute, naturally – the sense of release was overwhelming.

Gloucester would probably have survived had Ludovic Mercier, their French outside-half, been aware of the mathematics of the thing and knocked over a late, perfectly straightforward penalty. The Premiership leaders were 26-6 down and taking a fearful pummelling up front, but a successful kick at that juncture would have left Munster needing a fourth try and 10 more points to stay alive in the tournament. Mercier did not kick the penalty, though. He tapped and ran, straight into a red-shirted brick wall. He could not conceivably have got it more wrong.

"We lost it out there, in every way," agreed the Gloucester coach, Nigel Melville, his voice flat, his gaunt complexion devoid of all colour. "We were headless, we panicked, we failed to handle the occasion. But anyone might have acted as Mercier did in the heat of the moment, and I certainly wouldn't put it all down to him. Yes, we went through the sums, especially at half-time when Munster were 16-6 up and moving towards their target. Frankly, though, I was more concerned with us getting our hands on the ball. We didn't help ourselves – playing 20 minutes with 14 men against this lot in this place makes life pretty awkward – and in the end, we just let it all slip. I feel sick to be honest with you, and the worst of it is the feeling that we've let people down."

Those people – a couple of thousand travelling supporters in the bearpit itself and hundreds more in pubs and clubs dotted around Limerick and Cork – must feel every bit as sick as Melville: after all, Gloucester began the afternoon as stone-cold, cast-iron favourites to make it through to the knock-out stage. But they will get over it, for the entertainment transcended mere partisanship. They saw the Munster half-backs, O'Gara and Peter Stringer, operating at the peak of their powers; they witnessed the flowering of an astonishing talent in the shape of Donncha O'Callaghan; and they were a part of the Thomond Park experience, which is like no other experience in rugby.

"The Munster spirit? I guess I understood maybe half of what that phrase means before today," said Alan Gaffney, the Australian coach whose stewardship of Ireland's most passionate rugby province promises to yield considerable riches. "Now, I understand the whole of it. It is an awesome thing, staggering."

And O'Callaghan, a 23-year-old lock with all the talents? "He could be anything he wants to be in this game," Gaffney pronounced. "There is nothing he cannot do now, and he is only going to get better. He's as exciting a prospect as I've seen, either here or back home."

If O'Callaghan, unnervingly baby-faced but as hard as granite, led the wholesale demolition of a Gloucester pack that considered itself undemolishable, Alan Quinlan and Anthony Foley were no slouches either. They set out their stall from the kick-off – Henry Paul, the expensively recruited cross-code adventurer who continues to play like the rugby league specialist he is and appears incapable of performing even the most basic of union-specific duties, was petrified of the Munster hordes – and by the end of the first quarter, the home pack was in complete command.

John Kelly's opening try was the product of a scrummaging superiority bordering on the embarrassing, and when Kelly's fellow wing, Mossie Lawlor, latched on to a sly little short-side grubber kick from Jason Holland to open up a 10-point lead at the interval, the Munster miracle was on.

The third quarter yielded a third try – Mick O'Driscoll, a rough handful of a lock, made the most of another intelligent kick from Holland – and the beautiful symmetry was maintained to the death, when Kelly crossed on the overlap after smart work from Stringer.

Jim Williams, the Munster captain, maintained afterwards that his side were on top of the various calculations regarding try-count and points difference, but O'Gara, who kicked like a dream all afternoon, was none too sure that his final conversion amounted to much.

In fact, it amounted to everything. It was not the easiest of shots, particularly for a sensitive character who has felt his nerves shred on more than one big occasion, but such was his serenity as he went about his preparations that a miss was out of the question. He nailed it perfectly, giving his side the 27-point advantage they required.

"I didn't fully appreciate the importance of it until I got to the tunnel, when a bloke from Cork gave me the details," O'Gara laughed. "Jesus, I'd have hated to have missed it without really knowing what it meant. I'd have had some explaining to do to our forwards." And off he went, a beer can in each hand, for a night of pandemonium in a small Irish town that had suddenly expanded into the capital of the rugby universe.

Munster: Tries Kelly 2, Lawlor, O'Driscoll; Conversions O'Gara 2; Penalties O'Gara 3. Gloucester: Penalties Mercier 2.

Munster: J Staunton; J Kelly, M Mullins, J Holland, M Lawlor; R O'Gara, P Stringer; M Horan, F Sheahan, J Hayes, D O'Callaghan, M O'Driscoll, J Williams (capt), A Quinlan, A Foley.

Gloucester: H Paul (T Beim, 61); J Simpson-Daniel, T Fanolua, R Todd, T Delport; L Mercier, A Gomarsall; R Roncero, O Azam, P Vickery (capt), R Fidler (A Eustace, 77), M Cornwell, J Boer, P Buxton (A Hazell, 49), J Paramore.

Referee: J Jutge (France).