Munster get their man at last

As expected, Munster yesterday confirmed that Alan Gaffney will succeed Declan Kidney on June 1st as the province's new director of rugby. The 55-year-old Australian, who has been assistant to Matt Williams at Leinster for the past two seasons, has agreed to a three-year contract as Munster's head coach.

The easy-going and popular Gaffney admitted that ending a five-year working relationship with Williams and severing his ties with the rest of the Leinster management and playing squad was an enormous wrench. But succeeding Kidney was, he said, the biggest challenge of his coaching career.

"I've had a great two years at Leinster, and they've been the best guys I've ever worked with in rugby in terms of administration, management and players. I mean that sincerely. It was very difficult to leave, but it's a great opportunity and a great honour to be asked to coach Munster."

A former player and coach at the famous Randwick club in Sydney, where he is one of only 15 life members in honour of his distinguished service to the club, Gaffney coached the New South Wales Under-21 backs and then the NSW Waratahs' backs as assistant to Williams in the Super 12 for three seasons, before they renewed their partnership two years ago.

"I couldn't have asked for someone better to work with than Matt Williams. It was thanks to him that I first came to Ireland. That's why it was such a hard decision to make, and the same with (manager) Ken Ging, but it was a decision I had to make.

"As I always say to the players, 'never die wondering'. Just go for it, I tell them, and if I hadn't taken this job then I'd be a total hypocrite," he explained.

"Munster have probably been the highest performing team in Europe over the last three or four years," Gaffney also conceded. "It's a very tall mountain, but they're not far from the top of it. It's going to be a challenge and Declan will be a hard act to follow."

The most challenging aspect of the job to some degree will be, he admits, "getting a better handle on the Munster culture and tradition. It's something I'll have to devote a lot of time to."

Although Gaffney will still be employed by Leinster when the sides meet tomorrow, the changeover in the summer should be a smooth and harmonious one, which - like his long-overdue trip home to see his children, pencilled in for June - may well be brought forward.

Gaffney had planned to attend Munster's European Cup semi-final against Castres on Saturday week in Beziers in any case.

Leinster had beaten off Newport, who had also been wooing Gaffney, but despite a much-improved offer could not beat off Munster. Nevertheless, tributes to Gaffney gushed out of Leinster following his decision, and it will assuredly help the teething stages of his tenure that the word on the player grapevine will be highly complimentary.

In the last two years as assistant/backs coach, Gaffney has built a reputation as an ultra-positive coach, who always seeks to bring the best out of his players He is also more inclined than many coaches to develop individual skills.

Endorsing Ging's description of Gaffney as "one of the nicest people I know and he'll be a great loss to us", Williams described his colleague as "a fantastic coach who happens to be a great human being as well".

"It's breaking his heart leaving us and it's like losing a brother. All of us wanted him to stay, but it's understandable that he wanted the challenge and we wish him the very best."

As with the dissolution of any successful partnership, however, be it Burton and Taylor or Clough and Taylor, there's not only a fair amount of sadness within Leinster circles about the breaking up of Williams and Gaffney, but also a concern that neither will be quite as effective without the other.

In any event, Leinster's loss is Munster's gain in the short term. Munster may well have the more obvious second-in-command should they bring Brian Hickey onto their ticket, as has long been rumoured, whereas there is no obvious replacement for Gaffney in Leinster.

So while Leinster officials, and some within IRFU, were quite chuffed at retaining Williams last month despite a lucrative offer from Saracens, in a sense they are now paying for their failure to instigate negotiations with Williams and Gaffney much sooner.

After all, that is the way of, say, football in the post-Bosman era and indeed modern professional sport generally. Professionally-run clubs do not allow successful coaches or players to reach the end of their contracts without seeking to nail them down to longer ones.

Had Leinster attempted to do so with Williams and Gaffney at the turn of the year, when the province had just become Celtic League champions, they might have saved themselves some money before the market value increased and thus retained both men without any mention of Saracens or Newport, or for that matter Munster.