No blame game for Connacht captain after controversial loss to Gloucester

AS the final curtain came down on Connacht’s best ever season, captain John Muldoon said: ‘The best is yet to come’.

The Portumna man said that last Sunday’s controversial defeat away to Gloucester in the Champions Cup play-off was one of the darkest days for the province. But he insisted Connacht would rise again and confidently declared the future is bright with all the young talent that is being nurtured locally.

The back-row, who started every league game this season, should this week be resting and preparing for a qualifier clash with Bordeaux-Begles at the Sportsground. Instead, Muldoon, is on holidays earlier than hoped, still trying to figure out how a controversial refereeing decision in Kingsholm cost them a famous victory.

Connacht were robbed by an appalling refereeing decision by Romain Poite near the end but Muldoon was measured in his critique when speaking to Tribune Sport on Wednesday.

“That’s sport,” he said. “When you have someone making a call in live time, it’s easy in hindsight looking back to say, ‘oh this decision is wrong and that decision is wrong’. Ultimately he made a couple of bad decisions. Every man on the street and every dog on the street knows that he made bad decisions. Unfortunately for us, sometimes those decisions can be critical.

That’s probably the second or third time this year that a decision has gone against us and it’s been a critical decision. But no referee and no player goes out to make mistakes. It just happens and I’m sure the powers that be will deal with it. I don’t think Connacht fans will be hoping to see Romain Poite coming back to the Sportsground any time soon.”

One of the other refereeing decisions that Muldoon referred to was the controversial one away against Cardiff, which spurred coach Pat Lam into a public outburst for which he was later reprimanded. So why does Connacht get such a raw deal?

“Sometimes there’s a perception out there that maybe we shouldn’t be winning. But the past two seasons in a row we’ve won the fair play award for the least amount of citings and least amount of yellow cards. That’s twice in a row we’ve won it, but yet there seems to be a perception from maybe the old days that Connacht must be doing something illegally or they’re not doing something right because they shouldn’t be winning these sort of games.

“Maybe there’s a perception out there that we shouldn’t be winning these games and maybe they look at us a little bit more. At the weekend, there was a partisan crowd, Gloucester are known to be a tough crowd and they put pressure on the referee and all that probably added to the occasion and probably added to the call.

“Sometimes you get a call at the Sportsground that maybe afterwards you look at it and say ‘Jesus, we were lucky there’ . . . we are bitterly disappointed. Deep down we feel we probably deserved to win. That’s the hardest part.”

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