Munster will fight
FRANK KEATING
1 t is tricky to call the outcome of this weekend's European club rugby semi-finals. That both matches will thunderously reverberate is not in doubt, however. The Heineken Cup has upstaged the Six Nations international championship for standards, skills, surprises and, certainly, for engrossing passions. It is by far the most compelling competition in all rugby; annually, its closing rounds produce irresistibly scaly pile-ups, never more intriguing than this time when the four dauntless semi-finalists nicely reflect the outcome of last month's international series, vengefully won by France, with Ireland a merry second and a pallid England, hungovcr from the World Cup, wanly off the pace.
France provide two semi-finalists, and Ireland and England one each. Biarritz and Toulouse will tap the juices in Bordeaux all right, and the luck of the draw has given Munster what amounts to home advantage in Dublin against the unflinching hard-nut Londoners, Wasps, led by England's grisly, rock
chinned field-marshal Dallaglio. The faster feet and prettier passing should be at Bordeaux, while Dublin's antique and splintery old Lansdowne Road arena will seethe with close-quartered intensity and all the craic will be bone on bone and knuckle on knuckle. The romantic money (mine, anyway, for the land of my fathers) will be on Munster: heroically, it is their fifth successive semi, though they have yet to win a final, I'm afraid hunch allied to reason, however, insists Wasps will play Toulouse in the Twickenham final on 23 May.
Of all the amateur suburban London clubs. Wasps have coped best with the game's professional turmoils. They have retained homespun loyalties. In the dear, daft days of coarse rugger Wasps were notable missionaries. In the 1950s they fielded up to 15 teams some Saturdays. They used to send down an Extra B side to rough-up us schoolboys at Douai high on the Berkshire hills. They played dirty but with a congenial, matey grin of the happy freemasonry. One of my first rugby heroes was a Wasp, the bold, blond, bullocking England wing. Ted Woodward was a High Wycombe butcher who would open the shop of a Saturday morning, put on his apron and chop up a parcel of fresh lamb cutlets to bring to Twickenham and present to his opposite number. Munster rugby is just as generous, just as hearty but, if anything, even more unblinkingly thick-skinned. Munster's half-backs have historically ensured the ball stays close to a mighty forward pack and its manfully malevolent man's-gotta-do dirty work. Cork provides the daring, darting halves — in this weekend's case, the leggy O'Gara with the applescrumper's country-boy cheeks and his wee leprechaun buddy Stringer — while the frontrow forward of the deep, dark recesses has always been shining monarch in olde grey Limerick. One of that city's hotbed rugby grounds, Tom Clifford Park, is even named after an imperishably famed and fist-happy Munster prop forward of half a century ago — an arena referred to by cheerful sabre-rattling local heretics as 'The Garden of Get Somebody'. Munster look to transport that intimidating sentiment north to Dublin's darling, dilapidated and decaying old stadium. Aeons ago, my late Uncle Kearney from Cork took me to my first match at Lansdowne Road. He scanned the crumbling edifice with pride, `Grandad and his brothers helped build this place in 1907,' he announced. `Did they now?' a voice behind us said. 'Then wherever they are your fellows should be absolutely bloody ashamed of themselves.'
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