Rory O'Connor

There's lots going on.

The less high-profile you are, the less international you are, the less attractive you are to sponsors.

Playing budgets are going up all the time.

It's a challenging environment.

And Ian Flanagan and the staff there, it's a tough job, but they...

You think about where the brand was 20 years ago, and a lot of the people who are working there now weren't there, but when Toyota were one of the biggest sponsors in the game, when Munster were welcoming the All Blacks, and the position of power that they held, it doesn't feel anywhere near as strong.

And the result is that people are going to lose their jobs.

And for the players sitting in South Africa, scrolling through their phones and hearing the messages that the CEO flew back from South Africa to address staff on Tuesday in a fairly hastily... I think they were told on Monday there was a meeting and on Tuesday they were informed that these redundancies were happening.

That's another...

layer of pressure on the players because they know that if they don't get top eight this is just the start of it you know and and their voluntary redundancies now but we all know anyone who's been through redundancies know that if they don't get enough voluntaries then compulsories are probably on the way so it's a really tricky spot for them it's not related to the rfu's overall cost cutting initiatives that have been going on that haven't as i understand have been implemented so there could be more coming from lads down down the road as well so this is a precarious enough position for munster to be in

And the problem is if you start cutting budgets at the playing side of things, then the performance is likely to go down.

And that is alarming.

And Munster fans know where they've got holes in the squad.

They need strong overseas signings to supplement what they've got coming through.

An improving academy, it's not producing at the highest level, but it is an improving academy.

And they haven't been able to replace kind of legendary figures like for like, which is a hard thing to do, but...

I think that they're not achieving on their potential at the same time.

I think Munster should be one of the strongest teams in the URC year in, year out.

I think there's enough good players in there to be much more competitive and picking up those bonus points that you're talking about.

So there's an underperformance there, but the cost of that underperformance could be felt...