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My bad.
Munster’s opening pool game in the Champions Cup against Bath on Saturday didn’t exactly go to plan.
The southern province were on the wrong end of a 40-14 defeat to the reigning Premiership champions, having been absolutely obliterated in the first half.
Weather conditions weren’t great, with Munster losing their first five lineouts of the game, and captain Tadhg Beirne has put his hand up to take the blame.
Beirne said he should have changed things earlier, and was also sin-binned for a maul offence that led to Bath’s try, with the English side also grabbing 14 points while he was in the bin.
“I’ll take that one on my shoulders,” Beirne said of Munster’s lineout.
“We should have went away from the seven-man earlier. We lost two in a row, and then I went back to it again. I probably, in hindsight, obviously, but that was just a silly error on my part, going through it again.
“It would have been the smart decision to get away from it and obviously lost it again, lost another one and then compounded that with a penalty down into the corner and then my yellow card was punished pretty severely when I was off the field.
“So yeah, look, it’s probably on my shoulders those first 20 minutes, unfortunately.
“I’ll have to get over that and move on for next week, but I thought the fight from that point when I came back on was probably more like the Munster we know.
“The lineout was still up and down at times. They defended it well, and we just, the execution wasn’t there at times, and then we got a hold of it for a while, but we’ll regroup, and we’ll go again next week.”
