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Ireland’s failure to raise a gallop against the All-Blacks in Croke Park on Saturday gave fresh context to the monumental achievement of the Munster team in 1978. As Munster play host to the All-Blacks this Tuesday, Joe Ó Muircheartaigh looks back at that storied triumph.
 ON Friday night just gone, Sideline View, which is Clare FM’s flagship sports bulletin from 6pm to 7pm talked some rugby with the help of Paul Morgan of Rugby World Magazine.
Down a phone-line from Cardiff, Morgan talked All-Blacks and Munster rugby. Around the same time Pat Costello was in another Clare FM studio getting his playlist together for his Wheels of the World traditional music programme that went to air at 7pm.
The pity was that Pat wasn’t spirited away from his CD collection for a few minutes to join in the All-Blacks and Munster rugby talk.
You see, Pat would have had a great little story to tell, going all the way back to when the wheels of his world turned towards the Munster rugby team as they prepared to take on the All-Blacks in Thomond Park on October 31, 1978.
Pat played his rugby for St Senan’s in Shannon back in ‘78, but it was his off the field cameo performance that played a vital role in teeing up the greatest day in Munster rugby history.
Pat became one of the many little cogs in the machine that Tom Kiernan built.
WHEN Munster were hammered 33-7 by Middlesex during their disastrous tour a month before the All-Blacks came to Limerick, Kiernan knew he needed as many cogs as possible to turn his motley crew of under-achieving players into giant-killers.
Pat Costello became part of the story in the days leading up to the match - on the eve of the match he should have been enjoying his Bank Holiday Monday off work with the state training agency ANCO. Worked hard that Monday though.
“Tom Kiernan contacted me through a man I knew called Matt O’Mahony,” recalls Pat. “I was an audio visual training officer with ANCO and Tom wanted me to collect tapes of the All-Blacks’ previous matches that were being brought over to Shannon by a lady from England.”
That lady was Dinah Maxwell-Muller, worked in London for the Hamlyn publishing company. Her boss was Brian Busteed, an old college friend of Tom Kiernan’s.
Busteed had promised to forward tapes of the All-Blacks games to Kiernan. But, when they hadn’t landed in Cork by the Friday before the game, one of Kiernan’s plans for the All-Blacks was up in a heap.
“I need to get this package across to Ireland today,” Busteed told his secretary, “so I want you on the next plane to Shannon where someone will be waiting to collect it”.
“What will he look like,” Maxwell-Muller enquired. “He will be 6 foot 2 and will be wearing a red jumper. I think you’ll find one another all right. He’ll be looking for a skinny blonde.”
“She arrived in Shannon,” recalls Pat, “and was ushered into the VIP lounge. It was like James Bond stuff, she handed me over the bags of tapes and I was gone in two seconds. Our meeting was over.
“Video recorders that time were very scarce, if not non-existent. The tapes were for a Phillips 1500 machine, which very few people had. The machines I had at work were industrial video recorders. The tapes weren’t compatible so I had to transfer all the tapes.
“On the Monday night the whole team came into the ANCO Training Centre on the Dock Road in Limerick. There we watched the videos, looking at the All-Blacks, stopping the tape when Kiernan said so, rewinding the tape and playing parts of it a second time. This was the day before video analysis, so Kiernan was really ahead of his time.”
Not that Kiernan’s pioneering ways ended there.
EARLIER that Bank Holiday Monday after training in St Munchin’s College, the whole squad decamped to Killaloe where the Munster Branch of the IRFU splashed out and hired four cruisers for a pleasure boat journey on Lough Derg.
“Cormac Cruisers were there at the time and the boats were manned by lads who were playing with Ballina-Killaloe,” recalls Brendan Foley.
“There was a fair bit of messing going on, horseplay between the boats. Lads being thrown out the back of the boats and buckets of water being thrown down on top of them.
“It was great fun and great for spirit - I remember Tom Kiernan grabbing a boat cover to protect himself from water bombs. We all got soaked, but were happy.”
All that was left for Foley was to work a half-day on Tuesday, meet up with the players in Jury’s Hotel for a light lunch and head to Thomond Park for the afternoon that turned out to be the biggest and greatest occasion of their rugby lives.
“At the time it was treated as just another game,” says Foley. “I worked by half-day with Dwane’s Minerals. It was a case of them giving me a half-day off to play rugby. I had the gear in the car as I went around to shops and pubs taking orders. Then I went and played my game and was back to work the following day. That’s the way it was.”
Others were in the same poistion - players and supporters. Larry Moloney worked in the bank; Gerry McLoughlin was teaching; Pat Costello was in his office on the Dock Road before heading to the match with his nine-year-old daughter Emer.
Come 3pm they were all ready to rumble.
BRENDAN Foley: “We were confident. Munster had always done well against the All-Blacks. Munster had already beaten Australia, while we kind of expected the All-Blacks win to happen. We knew it was going to come some time, so this was our big chance to finally get the right result against them.”
Pat Costello: “It was a darkish, dour sort of day. I remember the atmosphere around the whole game. People were out to enjoy themselves and there was a great buzz about the place. It was a time before trendies went to matches - everyone there was a real rugby supporter.”
Brendan Foley: “The All-Blacks had this ploy of using Stu Wilson in a move coming in from the wing and quite close to the out-half. Seamus Dennison wasn’t the biggest of men but he came in and cut Wilson in two with a tackle. Both of them were hurt, but Dennison got up first.”
Seamus Dennison: “I poleaxed him. Moss Finn came up to me afterwards and said get up quick. That’s what I did.”
Stu Wilson: “I was saying ‘Shit, where did that come out of’. That tackle just didn’t stop me. It beat me backwards, it hurt my reputation.”
Corris Thomas, referee: “It was the most incredible tackle I saw in 17 years refereeing. It was literally as if he had run into a brick wall and just slid down it. He just collapsed in a heap. He didn’t go backwards, he just crumpled. I looked around and every Munster player had grown 12 inches.”
Pat Costello: “You don’t remember all of the game, but you remember the tackle. You could hear it up in the stand - he hit him that hard.”
Brendan Foley: “That tackle set the tone for the afternoon and the try really set us up. Beforehand we knew we’d be in trouble in the line-outs because they had Frank Oliver and Andy Haden.
“We had a plan though, which was to compete for the ball and prevent them from catching clean ball. Moss Keane said we pushed in the line-outs and jumped in the scrums. We jumped across and tried to judge it so that we’d hit inot their hand and prevent them from catching cleanly.
“Another thing was that Tom Kiernan had me standing at number one for a few line-outs. I took a quick ball from Pat Whelan and slapped it back to Donal Canniffe. He gave the ball to Wardy who crossed kicked. The ball bounced perfectly for Jimmy Bowen who rounded Wilson and McKechnie and put Christy Cantillon in under the posts.”
Pat Costello: “I remember the excitement of the try. It was as if there was almost a silence for a second and the next thing there was uproar. The place went crazy.”
Brendan Foley: “We knew they were going to throw everything at us after that, but we weren’t going to let go. Still it was hair raising stuff. The backs did some fierce tackling at the end of the first half when the All-Blacks piled on the pressure. Then Wardy dropped a goal to put us 9-0 up at half-time. At that stage we were just hoping to hold out.”
Graham Mourie: “Munster beat us so comprehensively that we were forced to have a long hard look at the way we were playing. In the dressing room afterwards Bryan Williams said it was one of those games when we were lucky to score nil.”
THIRTY years on Brendan Foley will make the short journey from Killaloe for the reunion. And, when the team are introduced to the crowd before the game, the roar for Foley will say it all.
As Alan English said in his brilliant book Stand Up and Fight “Brendan Foley was the player the ordinary supporter identified with more than any other. In Foley they saw themselves.”
Later Foley and his fellow band of brothers will talk about the great day over pints. The tour to England; Seamus Dennison cutting Stu Wilson in two; the boat trip; the tortuous training in Fermoy in the weeks leading up to the game.
“There were no lights there you know,” says Brendan “so we trained under the lights provided by our cars parked up along the sideline. It was great craic. I used to say ‘Tommy (Kiernan) can you switch to dims, Mossy is having a gawk’, or ‘Tommy turn on the indicators, Mossy is about to turn’. It was great.”
They’ll talk about Dónal Canniffe’s father Dan, who took ill while listening to the match on the radio at home in Cork and died; they’ll talk about how he was honoured in the All-Blacks dressing room when the Maoris among them led by Bryan Williams performed a sacred chant in his memory.
And, there’ll be talk of Tom Kiernan’s pioneering ways and the viewing of the video in the ANCO warehouse on Limerick’s Dock Road.
“I said to myself at one stage that I must get a brass plate and put it up on the wall to commemorate the Munster team being in the ANCO Centre on the Dock Road,” says Pat Costello.
“I had a letter from Tom Kiernan for years. We had a bit of a mishap in the house and the letter was mislaid. It was an acknowledgement from Kiernan for what I had done. It’s a shame I don’t have it.”
He doesn’t have the red jumper either, but the tapes still survive. The original ones that the skinny blonde Dinah Maxwell-Muller brought over to Shannon and the re-formated ones that could be played on the big industrial video recorders in the ANCO training centre.
“I must get them down sometime and play them,” says Pat.
“It just shows you how far technology has travelled,” he adds.
Munster have travelled a long way too, but you know that game will never grow old.
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