Rory O'Connor

They've gone back to Cape Town this week

But, you know, this two week tour in South Africa, it really lives or dies near results.

You can feel great in Cape Town when you're feeling good about your rugby.

But if you're having massive introspective meetings and feeling sorry for yourself when you're thousands of miles from home, even if the weather is good, that can get on top of you.

And we saw last year, like this is this is the tour that led to Graham Ranchi losing his job because we never got it.

No one knows what happened in South Africa last year except for the people who were there because it's basically been a completely tight-lipped ship.

They never released an Access Munster video about that trip, even though they do one about every other game.

That was a really rancorous tour that ended in a coach losing his job.

I'm not saying McMillan's going to lose his job, but these tours can be really difficult.

And they're in a tough spot.

And I think what comes out this weekend in Pretoria will say a lot about where this Munster squad are going.

Because if they go and produce a performance and even pick up a couple of bonus points, they're back on track to a degree because they've got their South Africa tour back and they've got that bank of points from the first five games of the season, which is really what they're relying on right now.

It was last June.

Yeah, well, they haven't had a home European knockout game since Johan van Graan's last season when they hosted Exeter at Tholman Park in a second leg round of 16 game.

There was 21,000 at that game in Tholman and then they took Toulouse to the Aviva Stadium and lost a penalty shootout in front of 41,000 the day Zombie was born.

which feels like a long time ago now.

And they've had two head coaches since then.

Roundtree never secured a home knockout game, but he did, I think, get them to the knockouts in his season.

Yeah, the Sharks.

They lost to the Sharks away.