Oct 09,2024
Munster head coach Graham Rowntree has played down the extent of his side's injury troubles, and insists the province’s fitness issues are simply down to bad luck.
Peter O’Mahony and Oli Jager are the latest to be ruled out of Saturday’s big BKT United Rugby championship Interpro with Leinster at Croke Park, with O’Mahony already a doubt for Ireland’s Test against New Zealand next month due to a hamstring issue, while Jager is also set to miss this weekend with a neck injury.
The province’s squad update on Tuesday morning made for grim reading with Alex Nankivell, Tom Ahern, Mike Haley, Billy Burns, Shane Daly and Ruadhan Quinn all either carrying injuries this week or stepping up their recovery from injuries.
However, Rowntree clarified that he was optimistic that Haley, Ahern and Nankivell would be available for the trip to Croke Park, while he was confident others would be available again next month.
"I’d say Mike will be alright," Rowntree said of Haley, who departed the second half of Saturday’s win against Ospreys with a leg contusion.
"He got a bang on his leg but we looked after him.
"Billy [Burns] I’m not so hopeful on, I’ll be honest with you there and I’m certainly not going to push him and bring him back when he’s not ready to come back.
"The others you mentioned [Nankivell and Ahern] are certainly back in the mix.
"Rory Scannell, Shane Daly, Pady Patterson are all coming back in November. We’ve got Diarmuid Kilgallen, Liam Coombes, Thaakir Abrahams, Peter O’Mahony (below), they’ll be back at some point in November which is only weeks away.
"So this 'crisis’, we’ve lost a few bodies but certainly everybody should be back on deck by the end of November from the recent injuries."
The reaction to this slew of injuries so early in the season has largely been born out of past experiences, with the province also dealing with extensive injury lists in each of the two previous campaigns, which forced Rowntree into making emergency signings on both occasions.
It has prompted questions around the level of Munster’s training, conditioning and recovery, but when asked if the province had reviewed their training arrangements, the Munster coach was adamant that their injury list was down to nothing but bad luck.
"You’re always reviewing what you do. We can't shy away from our injury list but you have to be calm about this, you have to look at the correlation between what's going on.
"These days there’s a lot of data available, so we can plan training to the minute, we can plan the distance guys are running to the exact minute, and we’ve done that.
"We had a good drill-down into the data, and there's no correlation between injuries. They’re all different. They may be in the same area, it may be in the leg, but they’re all different injuries from different aspects of the game. We had Shane Daly falling on his elbow awkwardly in Parma, Oli Jager with his neck, Pete [O’Mahony] pulls up with a hamstring at the weekend. There’s no correlation.
"You can be careful. At times like this you chase and look under every stone. I trust the people who work for us, the sports scientists," he added.
