Retired Ireland and British and Irish Lions scrum-half Conor Murray has revealed what it was like to have Rassie Erasmus as his Munster boss.
The South African was only in charge for a single season at the Irish province, joining in the summer of 2016 and exiting the following year to take charge of the Springboks, whom he has since led to back-to-back Rugby World Cup triumphs.
Murray has dedicated an entire chapter titled The Erasmus Scholarship in his new Cloud Nine autobiography. Looking back eight years after Erasmus exited Limerick, the recently retired 36-year-old No.9 claimed Munster could have “done something really special” had the South African remained in charge.
Instead, after a season that involved the tragic death of Anthony Foley, Erasmus headed home to South Africa… and the rest is history as far as title-winning Springbok rugby is concerned.
“I say that as someone who felt the cutting edge from him in person…”
Murray began the chapter by praising Erasmus for showing “proper leadership” in the awful week following the death of Foley in October 2016, and he finished the 14-page reflection by describing his reaction when the news broke that the coach was leaving Munster after just one year in charge.
“We were gutted with the news, the senior players anyway, because we knew we had an exceptional head coach. He was like what you’d imagine Alex Ferguson was like at Manchester United. Rassie was going to be a one-man revolution. And I say that as someone who felt the cutting edge from him in person.”
That cutting edge involved the pressure Murray came under to play against Saracens in a Champions Cup semi-final in Dublin. Murray had been nursing nerve damage sustained in a Six Nations tackle from Wales’ George North, and it ultimately resulted in him not playing in the club semi-final.
Taking up the story, he wrote: “Rassie is on to me all that week. ‘Are you okay? Will you play?’ Then it’s like, ‘Ah, you should be fine.’ There’s a bit of the old South African machismo in his attitude and, in general, that is no bad thing.
“The downside is this old-school rugby mentality where you should play injured, no matter what the consequences are. Pain is for wimps and all that. Just play through the pain barrier and you’ll be fine.
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“It’s kind of like a test of your manhood for him. Are you man enough to play through the pain barrier? But he doesn’t know what the consultant in the Mater Hospital has told me and I don’t tell him.
“It’s two days after my 28th birthday and if I was four years younger, I’d have succumbed to the pressure, I’d have been guilt-tripped into it… but I’m a small bit older now and I make my final decision: I’m not playing. And I tell Rassie I’m not playing, end of story. Duncan Williams will start, there’s no spare scrum-half on the bench.
“I believe I did the right thing. The neck has never been right since. I’ve been getting injections and physio on it from that day to this. After I retire, I will probably need to get an operation on it. I’m glad I didn’t risk doing further damage that day.”
Without Murray, Munster were comfortably beaten by Saracens who went on to lift the trophy some weeks later in the final against Clermont in Edinburgh. Billy Vunipola was the London club’s star in that decider, but an injury he played with ultimately ruled him out of the British and Irish Lions tour to New Zealand that Murray has also been selected to go on.
It was a picture of a bandaged-up Vunipola that Erasmus used to take a swipe at Murray, calling the Saracens back-rower “a proper club player”.
“A week or so after Sarries beat Clermont in the Champions Cup final, word breaks that Billy Vunipola is out of the Lions tour,” explained Murray in his book. “Billy would have been a shoo-in at number eight for the Lions Test team. He was the man of the match in the Clermont game.
“Apparently, he’d been nursing a shoulder injury through the latter stages of the season with Sarries. On several websites carrying the story, there’s a photo of Billy with his jersey off and his right shoulder wrapped in bandaging.
“I remember after we’d beaten Ospreys in the PRO12 semi-final at Thomond Park and were preparing for that brutal final against Scarlets a week later, Rassie was doing his video analysis at a team meeting.
“Out of the blue, he puts up on the projection screen one of the online reports about Vunipola’s injury. It was accompanied by the picture of Billy with his bandaged shoulder. And Rassie’s like, ‘That’s what a proper club player is’.
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“It was definitely directed at me. As in, Billy Vunipola had played through the pain barrier for his club, but there’s someone in the room who didn’t. There was no one else in the room who’d been touch-and-go with an injury for the Sarries match.
“Then he moved onto Munster business. It was done so quickly I wasn’t sure at first what to make of it. But when I thought about it afterwards, he’d gone to the trouble of downloading a report about a player who had nothing to do with us, and not just any report, but the one with the image of Billy Vunipola and his bandaged shoulder. It was a dig at me, it was definitely a dig.
“All I can say about it now is, feck you Rassie and the horse you rode in on. It was only a few weeks before the Saracens game that he told us, the players, he was definitely staying. You can’t but say he was completely vindicated too in that decision after all he has achieved with the Springboks. Fair play and congrats to him. We were gutted he left and, as it turned out, with good reasons too.”
Earlier in the chapter, Murray described Erasmus as “a blunt, hard-nosed South African – you could tell he was an old-school Springbok from his confrontational attitude”. He then went on to recall a fractious team meeting at Munster where the head coach – bad cop to assistant Jaques Nienaber’s good cop style – flared up and banished a player from the set-up for a fortnight.
“When Rassie was bad, you’d know all about it. We were reviewing a game on video one Monday morning in the meeting room in UL and Rassie was making a very serious point when he noticed one of the lads wasn’t paying full attention.
“This fella was smiling about something, as if what Rassie was saying was humorous in some way. Next thing, Erasmus turned his guns on him. He called this player out. ‘Do you think that’s fucking funny?’ There’s a pause while our fella realises what’s happening. ‘Do you think it’s funny?’
“All heads have turned to him now and he’s flustered; he doesn’t know what to say, and his smile is turning to embarrassment. Rassie’s like: ‘I’ll tell you what’s fucking funny. You can go back to your club for two weeks, because I’m not joking here, I’m not fucking around.’
“Jesus almighty. The room was totally silent. You could hear a pin drop. I never left a meeting so quiet in all my life. I remember we all left the meeting room and no one said a word. Yer man duly left and went back to his club for a fortnight.”
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