Munster's way is meaningless and it's not rugby, says Elissalde
To cut 90 minutes of high tension down to the barest of bones, the 2008 Heineken Cup final boiled down to that ancient rugby question: creativity versus containment. It is the classic way to play the French: deny the opposition the ball and slow down what ball they get, while being a bit niggly round the edges, and it takes a truly exceptional 15 Frenchmen to avoid the frustration that leads to penalties and handling errors.
Toulouse, on Saturday, were ordinary by their standards, faced with a Munster side who had the capacity to work in perfect unison to achieve their goal. The Irish side's iron grip left the French fly-half, Jean-Baptiste Elissalde, utterly confounded. In the final minutes he could be seen arguing vehemently with the referee, Nigel Owens, as he was penalised for going round a ruck. When the whistle blew he headed straight for the dressing room to calm down before returning to congratulate his Munster counterpart, Ronan O'Gara.
Afterwards, as he departed alone through the bowels of the Millennium Stadium, he said bitterly: "You must write this. Munster deserved what they got because we weren't very good but you can't play rugby like that. There were 15 minutes at the end of the game where we couldn't get our hands on the ball without infringing. It's getting like basketball where the only option is to make a technical error and take the points. That's not rugby, it's nothing."
The claim against Munster's clockwatching and their reliance on possibly the longest pick-and-go sequence ever seen in Cardiff is the same as that made against football teams who backpass continually to defend a 1-0 lead: it is lousy to watch and against the spirit of the game.
There are two answers to this: firstly, the game is not only played in Toulouse, the Toulouse way. Secondly, as Elissalde was man enough to admit, Toulouse had created a rod for their own backs by failing to capitalise on the possession they enjoyed early on, and by their inability to forge ahead having pegged Munster back to parity through the skill of their back three.
As the man at the heart of affairs, he bore much of the responsibility, although given that he is only a recent convert from scrum-half - and possibly only a temporary one with Frédéric Michalak returning soon from South Africa - his lack of patience at critical moments was easy to understand. He conceded: "If we had got a lead, then the last five minutes wouldn't have been pick-and-go, they couldn't have done it for ever. Le pick-and-go is meaningless, it's not rugby.
"I have nothing against the referee at all but he wasn't able to referee it. Either he had to let everything go, in which case it would have been total chaos, or he would have had to stop the game at every ruck. You had one guy diving alone on to the ground, another on top. At the end, I told him there were only blues [Munster] on the ground, no reds [Toulouse], no tackler and tackled, so I was not breaking the rules. But my English isn't super."
Munster were perfectly happy to agree with Elissalde, in one sense. They had won and had not won prettily. But the first part of the sentence was all that mattered. "I make no apologies about it," said the lock Donncha O'Callaghan, whose body bore the marks of a match that had been "as physical a game as we have played all year".
"It's ugly but it's effective for us. It's not the prettiest of rugby but it's hard graft to pick and jam like that for as long as we did. If you ask them they'll feel a team beat them playing boring enough stuff but we don't care." The lock added that, in his view, Munster's ability to close out the tightest of games - and Saturday's was certainly in that category - is bred, rather than created. "From schoolboys we're reared on cup rugby and how to win it out. It might be boring but who cares?"
Just as important was Munster's collective sense of the moment to strike, as seen in their first decent spell in the Toulouse 22 after half an hour when their physical urgency and unity of purpose outstripped anything shown by the French, and was duly rewarded by Denis Leamy's try. "If you analyse our game, you know what you're going to be met with: just doing it harder and more physically than any other team does," said O'Callaghan. "Teams know what's coming."
To Elissalde's charge that the Munster style was "not rugby" the lock had a simple answer. "I don't care. I've got a medal in my arse pocket," he laughed. To put it another way, no one remembers stylish also-rans. In the west of Ireland, this one will be savoured at least until the All Blacks come calling in the autumn.