Excited.

Munster captain Peter O’Mahony says the squad are “unbelievably excited to get stuck in” to Racing 92 this weekend after a disappointing few weeks for the province.

The southern province has lost three of their last four games, going down to Saracens at Allianz Park in the last round of the Champions Cup before suffering further defeats to Leinster at home and Ulster away in the festive inter-pros.

They’ve also picked up two serious injuries with Ireland internationals Tadhg Beirne and Joey Carbery facing lengthy spells on the sidelines.

We spoke to O’Mahony today and told him to forget about the criticism that has been thrown their way, ignoring everything that’s external to them and give us an honest assessment of the current mood in the camp at the moment, and after a long pause, he came back with the following…

“We have a huge week ahead of us,” O’Mahony said.

“We’re unbelievably excited to get stuck in.

“Yeah certainly guys were disappointed on Monday coming in but we’ve been in these situations before. You have a poor week but you have to put that to one side if you’re to have any hope of training well and getting prepared to play one of the best teams in Europe and that’s what we’ve done.

“We’ve had a great three days training. The eight or nine day turnaround gives us that little bit more of a window. So we’ve a bit longer. We kind of got a little ahead of ourselves on Monday which was good. We got all our reviews done and we put that to bed and still had the full week to get prepared which was important.

“But excitement is the word I’d use to describe the group at the moment.”

It’s do or die for Munster this weekend. A defeat to Racing will all but end their chances of qualifying for the knockout stages of the Champions Cup this season. Have they got a big performance in them? We’ll find out Sunday.