With Pau and potentially Toulouse and Stade Francais in the process of formally offering more lucrative offers than his
contract with Munster, Simon Zebo's future clearly remains in the balance. What's more, as he said yesterday, his circumstances have changed since he signed his last two-year deal.
Then he was a single 23-year-old. Now he is a 25-year-old father, after his girlfriend, Elvira Fernandez gave birth to their first child, Jacob, last May.
"It is not just me so I can't be selfish," he said with his customary smile at Munster's media briefing after training in Limerick yesterday. "There are a lot of things going to come into play. Hopefully soon enough we will be able to make a decision, and cross that bridge then."
Whenever that will be, will be. Either way, he has no deadline or timeframe in mind.
“I don’t have a clue, I don’t know. Once the people who are working for me in trying to sort that out come back to me and say, ‘Here’s what you have’, then I will decide. Until then I don’t know,” he said.
Laid-back style
Intent on leaving these matters to his advisers and agent
Shaun Longstaff
, the former Scottish international winger, his future does not particularly concern him at the moment.
“It wouldn’t bother me too much. I think whatever is best for me and my family, at the end of the day, once everything is known, then it will be easier to make my decision and decide what is best for me,” Zebo said.
That he is able to put all of this to one side in his own inimitably laid-back style, while concentrating on his rugby, is entirely credible. “No it is actually not [a distraction]. We train for a small time during the day so I just keep the rugby to the rugby, and the other stuff totally apart. It won’t affect my training, or my game,” he said.
The son of Arthur, a Martinique-born French athlete, Zebo speaks French and asked whether he was watching much Top 14 rugby, laughed.
"I have always been interested. It has always been on the TV, I would rather watch Top14 than watch some soaps on television, or Coronation Street or something. So it's always on, don't worry," he said.
Yet clearly his heart is still with Munster and all things being equal he would prefer to remain there in body too.
“Munster will always, always mean a lot to me. It’s my childhood club. I have supported Munster all of my life. It always will mean a great deal to me. But at the end of the day, rugby is a business and you can’t get swallowed up. You have to look after yourself and know what’s best for you and your family. Hopefully everything works out the way I would like it to. We will see what happens.”
‘Special nights’
It is nights like Saturday’s when Leicester come to Thomond Park in the European Champions Cup in what looks like a must-win game for Munster, which stirs Zebo and his ilk.
“They are the special nights, special times as a rugby player. They are impossible to replicate elsewhere. These are the nights where you really enjoy being a professional rugby player. You are very grateful when you get to play in front of sold-out Thomond Parks. It is going to be a special night. Hopefully we can make it a good one and win it.”
Critically, as well as financial considerations, it is imperative that the provinces remain competitive in Europe in order to keep their marquee players, and that certainly goes with the territory in Munster, champions of Europe in 2006 and 2008, and who have only missed out on the knock-out stages twice in the last 17 seasons, in 2010-11 and last season.
“Definitely, the European matches are where we set our standards, and we can’t let that slip. We need to be pushing for semi-finals and finals. That is the standard we have with Munster Rugby. We just need to make sure we take care of Leicester and take care of the group. And give a real push for the latter stages.”
Zebo confirmed that, starting with Anthony Foley’s “angry” address to the players in the aftermath of Sunday’s defeat to the Dragons, “there’s been a few things said and the players realise that some of the things that we’ve been doing on the pitch weren’t good enough”.
“There’s been a lot of talk but not a lot of action so I think there’s a big performance needed this weekend,” he said.
To that end, re-creating the customary Thomond Park cauldron for a Saturday collision with English opposition would help no end, he said.
