The day Munster shook the rugby world

By DUNCAN JOHNSTONE in Limerick - Stuff.co.nz

It was arguably the greatest upset in world rugby history. Munster 12 All Blacks 0.

"And we were lucky to get nil," says Stu Wilson, one of many All Blacks superstars humbled that day in October, 1978.

More than 100,000 people claim to have been at Thomond Park in Limerick to see Munster win, even though the ground could only hold 12,000.

The day has long passed into legend, inspiring a book and a play since.

Next Wednesday morning, New Zealand time, the All Blacks and Munster will meet at the same ground to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the day an unrated provincial side from the south of Ireland did what the nation is still to achieve - beat the All Blacks.

Nobody gave Munster a chance in the midweek match. Television cameras weren't even booked. Only snatches of the last 15 minutes were filmed, following a mad rush to the ground by a freelance cameraman sensing history in the wind.

The All Blacks match against Munster will open the new Thomond Park which includes a museum dedicated to the day in 1978 when the men of southern Ireland shook the rugby world.

We revisit that great game through the eyes of a player from each side, Munster prop Gerry "Locky" McLoughlin, and All Blacks legend Stu Wilson....

LOCKY'S STORY

My name is Gerry McLoughlin. I used to be a rugby player. Some called me 'Locky', others 'Ginger'. No one called me a coward. You could say I had my moments. A long time ago I played for Munster against the All Blacks. One hundred thousand people say they were at Thomond Park that day. Ninety thousand of them are liars. They've been at it for more than twenty-five years. Imagine lying to your grandchildren about a rugby match. I know why they do it though. What happened that day can never happen again.

I have the match ball in my attic. I swear to God it's the actual ball - I defy anyone to go under the lie detector against me. At thirteen minutes past three Tony Ward kicked it over the wall and into my cousin Marge Kenihan's yard. Her brother Jude was standing on a ladder, watching the match for free, and I gave him 100 for the ball. Some day I'll auction it for charity. Or if I go broke I might sell it for myself. There are other people claiming they had the ball and the whole bloody lot of them can go and scratch.

I was a prop forward. Loosehead or tighthead, I could play both sides of the scrum. And the front row is where it all happens. Where I'm from, the boys in the front row get respect. Our people like the hard men. Not too many backs ever became legends in Limerick. Tom Clifford, Gordon Wood, Keith Wood, Peter Clohessy - what do they all have in common? They all played in the front row.

Back then, the scrum was the key to winning any match. It was the only chance you had to wear down the opposition pack. It was the be-all and end-all. Without a good scrum, it didn't matter a damn what else you did on the field.

Whoever said scrummaging is an eight-man effort is a liar. For a start, the hooker doesn't worry about the props. You should never be hoping for too much from your back row either. You wouldn't want to rely on them. In the Munster team that day I wouldn't say Donal Spring ever broke his back with a push, you had Colm Tucker wanting to carry the ball and Christy Cantillon flying off the looking for f...king tries. The last thing on their mind was scrummaging. All they wanted to do was get out. So in the Munster pack, in actual fact, you're not going to get much help from your back row and the hooker's doing his own thing. You only have one or two friends in there.

If you want to beat the All Blacks, the first thing you've got to do is stand up to them, show them you are not afraid. Some people see fifteen men in black jerseys and they're beaten before the match even starts. In the front row, it's all about intimidation. If you allow them to intimidate you, the match is over - I don't care how good your backs are. Some people said they'd kill us in the rucks, that they'd kick the shit out of us when we went down on the ball. But we were use to getting kicked and raked. The rugby we played was fierce. It was nothing new to us to have to take a shoeing.

At Thomond Park, I was always aware that people who knew about propping were watching me. They'd say, "You were in trouble there. This was wrong, that was wrong." Nobody told you you if you played well. So the last thing you wanted to do was go backwards. You just couldn't let it happen, not in front of your own people. We knew where they lived, where they drank, what they did for a living, where they liked to stand in the ground. I was up against Gary Knight that day. Two stone heavier than me and three inches taller, but I didn't fear him. I never feared any prop in my life. He came onto the field with a bandage wrapped around his face, but I never gave it a second thought. I found out later that he had herpes. I found out because they told me I had it myself. In all this time I have never been able to shake it off. Some souvenir.

I'd never have played for Ireland if it hadn't been for the All Blacks match. You didn't get capped out of Limerick. Bias, bias, there was unbelievable bias against us. We knew it. It was a fact of life. We'd been told it as kids. I went to see Munster play the All Blacks in 1963. My father took me, I was twelve. They didn't win, but they gave as good as they got. The Munster hero that day was the tighthead prop.

"Who's the fella covered in blood, Dad?"

'That's Mick O'Callaghan. He's related to you."

"But I never saw him before."

"He's a cousin of your mother's."

"Does he play for Ireland?"

"One miserable cap, he got. You see, he plays for Munster and if you come from Munster you have to be twice as good as the fella that plays for Lienster or Ulster."

"What about if you come from Limerick?"

"If you come from Limerick, you have to be three times as good as the fella from Dublin. At least."

"What about if you play for Shannon?"

"If you play for Shannon, it doesn't matter how good you are."

I was a Shannon man. My father was a bus driver, seven days a week, all hours. Same as all the lads in Shannon, we were a working-class family. Our kind of people didn't get on the in the Irish rugby. One year Shannon were sent up to Dublin to take on the full Irish team in a practice match. First scrum, the push came on and Mick Fitzpatrick, the Irish prop went up in the air. He had Moss Keane behind him. Noel Ryan put him up in the air, legs split. They only brought us up once.  They knew if they'd brought us up again we'd have scrummaged the Irish team off the park. We'd done two hundred scrums a night for the previous seven or eight years. That's a lot of scrummaging. We knew how to get to a team, how to break them. It wasn't just a yard of a push, it was two or three yards. After half an hour of that, they'd be exhausted, dead on their feet. We knew the only way of getting on the Irish team was playing in a match where you could put yourself in the limelight.

Three of us got picked for Munster against the All Blacks that day. Ireland were playing them the following Saturday and the selectors didn't bother waiting for our match. They picked the Irish team three days previous. RTE didn't bother sending any cameras down to film it - they thought it was a waste of time. Nobody gave us a prayer. Some people were afraid for us. They didn't think we belonged on the same pitch.

The only man who believed we could win was Tom Kiernan, our coach. They called him the Grey Fox. He could make you believe no team was unbeatable. Not even the All Blacks.

He told us we had to stand up to them. He said, "They won't go round you, they'll try and go through you."

No one was going through me.

STU'S STORY

This match will live with me forever. How couldn't it? It was the one black spot on what was an incredible journey on that tour.

We went away wanting to win every game. We wanted to be the first All Blacks to win a Grand Slam and we wanted to be the new Invincibles.

We got our Slam but we also got a thumping from Munster.

As an All Black you hate to lose. You know how much it means to the country and to your team mates. And this loss hurt. It wasn't a test match yet in some ways that made it hurt more.

But the way it has evolved it has been kind of interesting to be part of something that has developed into such a rich piece of rugby history.

We certainly knew what we were in for that day in terms of a tough match.

Previous All Blacks games against Munster suggested this wouldn't be easy. Kirky's mob in '73 got away with a draw and in 1954 and 1963 both those games were 6-3. It wasn't as though they didn't have a pretty good record against us.

Mind you, we were feeling good about things by the time we got to Limerick. We'd run up some good scores in winning our first four games.

Jack Gleeson was our coach and he always encouraged an open style of rugby.  Play at pace and pass the ball was his philosophy. As a winger I couldn't ask for anything more. I loved scoring tries. Just give me the ball - that's all I wanted. And I'd been getting plenty ... I got two tries in both my first two games on the tour. I was feeling good and as I say, we were feeling good as a team.

The Munster coach Tom Kiernan came over and saw us play London Counties at Twickenham the weekend before. I sat that game out but it was pretty good viewing from the stands. We gave them a bit of a pasting, winning 37-12 and scoring six tries, two of them to Robert Kururangi who was running around on the right wing.

But old Mr Kiernan was obviously a clever man. He was an accountant after all and he'd obviously done his sums by the time we got to Thomond Park to face Munster.

The first thing that hit me when we came out from under the only stand they had at the ground was the noise. What a noise! They only had a crowd of about 12,000 there but it was the noise of about a hundred thousand. They were crammed in everywhere. I don't think you could have squeezed another person into the place. They sure loved the haka, the place went wild.

So the noise was the first thing that hit me. The second thing that hit me was a Munster tackle. Ouch!

I was called in early for an attack and that suited me just fine. The sooner the better when you're a wing. You don't want to be standing out there too long, you want to get involved. They had a little fellow called Seamus Dennison at centre in the midfield. I just got nailed by a huge tackle. It was just like I had run into a brick wall.

And that was the way it was all day. They just got right on top of us and bowled us over time and time again. We got no room at all - they suffocated us.

They had a fairly good forward pack. We were surprised they didn't throw green bloody jerseys on the whole Munster team, we probably would have got dicked by Ireland four days later up in Dublin. But they didn't fortunately.

So we hardly got a sniff while Munster took their chance when flanker Christy Cantillon got over for the only try of the game.

Tony Ward kept kicking the goals and slowly but surely that dread came into my stomach.

Inevitably it became too late to do anything about it. You could sense that the crowd knew that. When that final whistle went the invasion of the pitch was just crazy. The Munster men were mobbed, we were mobbed. It was hard to find your way back to the dressing room.

No one was happy in the dressing room and a bit of the gloss got taken off things for them when we learned that sadly their captain Donal Cannniffe's dad had died in the stand. It had all gotten too much for him with the excitement that was going on. A lot of their guys out of respect didn't go to the banquet afterwards.

We didn't get out on the town because in those days you had an official aftermatch banquet. We went to a castle for that. But we had a hellishly good night. Strangely I always seem to remember you normally tend to have a better time when you lose. It was an old-fashioned way of getting things out of your system. You got on it and then you got over it.

And this loss turned out to be the best thing for us in terms of our Grand Slam hopes.

Many of us had to back up a few days later for the test against Ireland - that wasn't a problem because that's what we had to do.

Our coach got his thinking cap on. We realised that everyone would have watched what Munster had done, seen how they had beaten us. We had to adjust.

Jack Gleeson said if that's what they are going to do - stand up all day, kick in behind us and knock us over - then we aren't going to go anywhere. So we had to basically play a similar game.

So we had to tone it down and go back to the norm - bludgeon them up front, kick to the corners and chase hard. Our whole tactics changed.

What it did, that hiding gave us four wins against the Home Unions. We were Grand Slammers.

Looking back that loss to Munster turned things around for us.