Interim coach Ian Costello says a lot has changed since Munster suffered a heavy defeat to the Sharks in Durban last October.
Munster have had a frustratingly inconsistent campaign but finished the league stage strongly, with home wins against Ulster (38-20) and Benetton (30-21) securing sixth spot on the Vodacom URC log, and an away quarter-final against the third-placed Sharks.
Upon arriving in South Africa, Costello insisted they weren’t motivated by what happened on their last trip.
No, that hasn’t come into it at all if I’m honest. I think the squad is in a different place. You look at the squad that travelled over here and there’s a huge difference between it and the squad that’s here this week.
It feels like there’s an awful lot more experience, guys really hitting their form, as I said, really competitive.
“We know them [the Sharks] really well,” he added. “We’ve looked at their last half dozen games as we always do. But a huge amount of focus has been on us. Look at how we’ve improved over the last period and how we’ve managed two very, very high pressure games [against Ulster and Benetton].
Essentially, we’re into the third knockout game in a row now. So we’ve extracted a lot of our learnings around that, that has [instilled] confidence in the group and it keeps the focus on who we are and what we do well as well.”
While qualifying for the URC quarter-finals, and next season’s Champions Cup, came as a huge relief for Munster, Costello said they weren’t satisfied.
“It absolutely isn’t a free shot,” he said of Saturday’s quarter-final. “There’s an expectation we need to be in knockout rugby, there’s a lot of pressure to get there. But now that we’re here, we’re very, very ambitious on what we want to achieve.
“We all know that we had to get into the playoffs. We had to get into the Champions Cup, that’s the expectation that comes with Munster, rightly so.
“I think it was really important that we drew a line under that first. We put an awful lot into that physically, mentally and particularly emotionally in that last two weeks. There was so much to be pleased with in those last two weeks.”
