Peter Jackson column: Underdogs Connacht my team of the season

John Muldoon achieved some notable firsts as a player at the end of the 20th century and the start of the 21st. A permanent fixture in a team bought by Sir John Hall, the inspiring Kiwi did more than his bit in making the newly-named Falcons the first English champion team of the professional game in 1998, a feat not likely to be emulated any day soon.
Two years later Lam's unbreakable will to win helped become the first English winners of the European Cup, dragging the patched-up Saints home against by a single point, a surprise so great that it took the odds-on Irish favourites the next six years to get over it.
What Lam has done this season from his base on the western edge of Europe makes those feats appear to shrink by comparison. As head coach of Connacht, he has put the game's perennial losers where they have never been before, in the Champions' Cup.
Now it may conceivably come to pass that or will win an English-European double or that Racing will beat them to it. Whatever the outcome, a strong case can be made now for Connacht as the team of the season irrespective of how it pans out.
Over the last nine months, they have rarely failed to strike a blow for the underdog on a scale so grand that someone ought to consider twinning Connacht's capital with a land-locked textile city in the East Midlands.
Galway, renowned for its beauty and the moon rising over Claddagh, has Galway Bay. Leicester, where they tend to find ancient English kings beneath car parks, has a canal and a football team that continues to outfox the big beasts of the soccer jungle.
Like Connacht, they have climbed from rock bottom to top. Unlike Connacht, Leicester City managed it without their governing body proposing to get rid of them on the basis that they had no future.
Had the Irish Rugby Union got their way, Connacht would have ceased to exist as a professional entity 12 years ago. The IRFU's response to an annual loss of €4m was to cast the Cinderella Men adrift.
An estimated 2,000 fans descended on Dublin to protest outside the Union offices, an impressive show of strength on behalf of a team then existing on an average gate of 600. Confronted by that and a threat from the country's players to go on strike, the Union capitulated.
Having claimed before then that “the future never looked brighter”, Connacht responded to the reprieve as though they had nowhere to go. In 2008, for example, when Munster reclaimed their European throne, Connacht finished bottom of the Celtic League.
John Muldoon captained the side then as now, the same John Muldoon whose marathon one-team career began in the very season when his native province had been condemned to join Celtic Warriors, and in the asylum.
Muldoon epitomises the special spirit of a province confined to five counties, four of whom, Sligo, Mayo, Roscommon and Leitrim, are among the least populous.
“There were times when I was in a very low place,'' he said recently. “But ultimately you get dragged back in by that sense of community, that sense of where you are from and who you are from.''
If Connacht and Lam are the team and coach of the season, then Muldoon deserves to complete the holiest of trinities as player of the season. A back-row forward whose defensive ability was never in question, he has broadened his game in keeping with Connacht's ever-rising horizons.
Under Muldoon's enduring leadership, they have changed not merely 's rugby landscape but Europe's. Last week's unprecedented 21-point win over Munster leaves the former double winners in danger of failing to qualify for the Champions' Cup.
As a declining Munster stare at a first of their own making, Connacht have already booked their place at Europe's top table. They won't stop there, not when there is a home Pro 12 play-off semi-final to be secured and a Grand Final to be reached at Murrayfield on May 28.
They have done it despite the usual injury wreckage and, what's more, without diluting their essential Irish flavour. Of the 23 on duty for the historic disposal of Munster, only three came from south of the Equator – Bundee Aki, Tom McCartney, Finlay Belham – plus one from south of Stoke – Aly Muldowney.
The Irish contingent numbered 16 with the pack half-full of local lads – Muldoon, Sean O'Brien, Eoin McKeon and Denis Buckley.  The other three – newly-capped second row Ultan Dillane, Nigerian wing Niyi Adeolokun and Test scrum-half Kieran Marmion – have come up through the ranks.
Rugby team of the season? For sheer inspiration, Connacht have turned it into a one-horse race…

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