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The West's awake

Muldoon hails effort of Connacht’s young front row after Dragons drama

“Conditions weren’t great, the rugby wasn’t great, but the win was. And that’s all that matters.”

CONNACHT CAPTAIN JOHN Muldoon was happy to accept the man-of-the-match award after the western province’s 14 – 11 win over the Dragons last night, but insisted he would be passing it on to those closer to the coalface.

In conditions that were horrible by the standards of any month, against an opponent renowned for their stubbornness at the breakdown, Connacht were thankful for the firm foundations laid by the front row of Brett Wilkinson, Jason Harris-Wright and Nathan White – and latterly Rodney Ah You and Denis Buckley – so Muldoon duly offered his richest praise for the men in the tight five.

“We’ve worked really hard. In comparison to a lot of teams we have a young front row. Bar Whitey we’ve no one over 30 years of age [in the squad] and I can’t imagine there’s another team in Europe that has a front row like that.”

Muldoon may have forgotten Brett Wilkinson’s 30th birthday bash in November, but his point still stands. As with every department, Connacht have to make do with limited resources. Yesterday was one of those occasions when they were able to dig deep and deliver.

“We are young, we are progressing. Rodney has made massive strides this year, he’s really come on;  fitness-wise and scrum-wise. So he’s coming into his own as a prop and that’s coming with age as well.

“On nights like this it’s all about where you can get some dominance and we had it up front with our scrum and that’s what paved the way for the win.”

He added: “I got man of the match, but to be honest it should have gone to one of the front five. I owe a beer to a few of them tonight.”

That scrum effort helped Connacht fight back from being 0 – 8 down to put Dan Parks in a position to seal the win with a late drop-goal and Muldoon joked that only Eric Elwood would have been a better option to have in that position.

The dreadful conditions came as no surprise to the flanker or the Connacht squad and, having won in Toulouse, a fortnight ago they now have a taste for victory, by any means.

“It was horrible out there, conditions weren’t great, the rugby wasn’t great, but the win was and that’s all that matters.

“We wanted a win. We said it first thing when we walked into the dressing room last week, we needed a win.

“We knew it was going to be messy, we knew it was going to be horrible all week and we tried to focus on the fact that we needed to be ball-tough and try to cut down the turnovers. Stats don’t lie. They were top of the league for the least amount of turnovers and we were bottom, so thankfully with Parksy’s drop-goal we got there.

The four points, Pat Lam’s fourth win as Connacht coach, was enough to lift the westerners off the foot of the Pro12 table. However, Muldoon admitted that it didn’t feel likely after playing into a gale in the first half and coming out to find milder conditions.

“When we came out after half-time the wind seemed to have died down a bit and I thought, ‘oh God, here we go’. It made it a bit easier for them to carry the ball out than it was for us. But look, this is Galway, the wind’s always going to pick up again and thankfully we played in the right areas and our scrum got us there.”

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