Ambitious Muldoon is anxious Connacht take the fight to Gloucester

CAPTAIN John Muldoon arrived at Connacht Rugby’s midweek press conference with tears rolling down his cheek. Still hurting from the drubbing away to Munster at the weekend? Not exactly.

The back-row forward was just out of the doctors after his eye was scratched in training earlier that morning. He didn’t say, but the Portumna man could be forgiven for shedding a sly tear three months ago, too. At home, on the couch, channel surfing, Muldoon stumbled across that epic TG4 programme, The West’s Awake.

The fly-on-the-wall documentary chronicled Connacht’s inaugural Heineken Cup season in 2011/2012 when they endured 14-straight defeats in all competitions.

Muldoon dipped into the action, midway through, just around the time in the season and programme when Connacht played Gloucester, who are this weekend’s Challenge Cup quarter-final.

“I had to turn it off. It still frustrated me,” he says.  Four years on and he still couldn’t watch the late horror unfold. Connacht were leading by three, but conceded a try four minutes from time through a missed tackle on Gloucester’s Johnny May.

They lost by four – their tenth loss in a row, and probably the most difficult to stomach given how they dominated the match.  It still hurts? “It always does,” says Muldoon. “At the time it felt like the World was on our shoulders and every time we thought we had a lifeline, something would come and take the ladder or the feet from under us, and that’s how it felt that night.”

Connacht have matured a lot since then. And even though they were fairly battered by Munster at the weekend – losing 42-20 and shipping six tries in the process at Thomond Park – there is no sense of doom about the place.

“When you go through that, maybe ten matches, nothing seems to go right for you and there’s an air of desperation in everything that you do. Whereas now ultimately we didn’t play as well as we’d hoped to play against Munster in Thomond Park, which is a lot like Gloucester in Kingsholm. We didn’t play to the best of our ability and in some aspects, not even close.

“But yet after 57 or 58 minutes, it’s seven-six. We know if we get things right we could be easily winning that game and winning it comfortably. When you think about it that way, we should be going into this Gloucester game with a lot of confidence and it’s up to us to fix those few things we got wrong.”

The loss to Munster was demoralising. But Muldoon accentuates the positives. After all, with just a handful of games remaining in the season, Connacht players aren’t looking ahead to the summer holidays – they’re very much in contention in the league and cup.

“First of all it’s great to be here,” he says. “It’s not too often you sit here coming in to the month of April and you’re in the top six in the league and you’re in a quarter final in Europe, and potentially a home semi-final. It’s exciting times for us. It is a cup, it is knockout, it is a competition that we’ve done well in but ultimately we’ve no silverware to show.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.