PETER O’MAHONY OPENS UP ON HUGE ROLE RASSIE PLAYED AT MUNSTER AFTER AXEL FOLEY’S PASSING

Rassie Erasmus is these days considered one of the best coaches of all time and one of the forefront innovators in the game, and when you look at his resumé, it’s hard to disagree.

He’s a back-to-back World Cup winner, and he’s won a Lions series with the Springboks while also changing how people view substitutions, revolutionising the 6/2 split and even a 7/1 forwards to backs split on the bench, utilising the athletes that South Africa are able to produce.

However, nearly 10 years ago, he took the Head Coach role at Munster at one of the toughest moments in the history of Irish rugby.

Then Munster Head Coach and Munster legend Anthony ‘Axel’ Foley passed away, and Erasmus took the responsibility of Head Coach, having been brought in that previous summer in a non-coaching role.

He would remain as Munster Head Coach until 2018, when the Springboks job became available and as a proud South African, Erasmus couldn’t turn the job down.

Speaking on The Good, The Bad & The Rugby, now former Munster and Ireland great Peter O’Mahony opened up about the struggle he and the team went through when Foley passed and how his name is still talked about with the current team.

‘It was an awful time for the club and for Irish rugby. Even for me, around that time in my career, I was still quite young, and we still talk about him now, and after a big game, we have a thing we do about Axel, and he’s always going to be part of the club.’

O’Mahony was then full of praise for Erasmus and the job he did to come in during such a difficult time and really do a clean-up from top to bottom at Munster

‘Yeah, he is mad. He was exactly what we needed at the time in Munster. When he came in, Axel was there, and obviously, when Axel passed, we were completely lost, and he hadn’t really planned on coaching at all. But he was just the exact coach we needed at the time.

‘We needed someone to kind of get rid of some of the bulls*** that was in the club, and he went hard at basics. He went hard at people turning up to training properly, that kind of stuff, and he was just the tonic that Munster needed.’

Erasmus is still doing his thing with the Springboks, blooding in new talent in Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezelu, and we in Ireland will get to see this new-look Springboks team up close when they come over on November 22 at the Aviva Stadium.

2025-10-02T06:07:21Z