{"id":426463,"date":"2025-09-15T14:26:19","date_gmt":"2025-09-15T14:26:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/426463\/"},"modified":"2025-09-15T14:26:19","modified_gmt":"2025-09-15T14:26:19","slug":"conor-murray-issues-feck-you-rassie-response-to-dig-at-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/426463\/","title":{"rendered":"Conor Murray issues \u2018feck you, Rassie\u2019 response to \u2018dig at me’"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Murray has dedicated an entire chapter titled The Erasmus Scholarship in his new Cloud Nine autobiography<\/a>. Looking back eight years after Erasmus<\/a> exited Limerick, the recently retired 36-year-old No.9<\/a> claimed Munster could have \u201cdone something really special\u201d had the South African remained in charge.<\/p>\n

Instead, after a season that involved the tragic death of Anthony Foley<\/a>, Erasmus headed home to South Africa<\/a>\u2026 and the rest is history as far as title-winning Springbok rugby is concerned.<\/p>\n

\u201cI say that as someone who felt the cutting edge from him in person\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Murray<\/a> began the chapter by praising Erasmus for showing \u201cproper leadership\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were gutted with the news, the senior players anyway, because we knew we had an exceptional head coach. He was like what you\u2019d 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019 George North, and it ultimately resulted in him not playing in the club semi-final.<\/p>\n

Taking up the story, he wrote: \u201cRassie is on to me all that week. \u2018Are you okay? Will you play?\u2019 Then it\u2019s like, \u2018Ah, you should be fine.\u2019 There\u2019s a bit of the old South African machismo in his attitude and, in general, that is no bad thing.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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\u2019ll be fine.<\/p>\n

\u2018Bitter stuff\u2019 \u2013 Conor Murray slammed after \u2018incredibly unfair\u2019 tirade at Graham Rowntree<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s kind of like a test of your manhood for him. Are you man enough to play through the pain barrier? But he doesn\u2019t know what the consultant in the Mater Hospital has told me and I don\u2019t tell him.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s two days after my 28th birthday and if I was four years younger, I\u2019d have succumbed to the pressure, I\u2019d have been guilt-tripped into it\u2026 but I\u2019m a small bit older now and I make my final decision: I\u2019m not playing. And I tell Rassie I\u2019m not playing, end of story. Duncan Williams will start, there\u2019s no spare scrum-half on the bench.<\/p>\n

\u201cI believe I did the right thing. The neck has never been right since. I\u2019ve 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\u2019m glad I didn\u2019t risk doing further damage that day.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u2018Deadly serious\u2019 reason why Johnny Sexton \u2018turned the air blue\u2019 with Conor Murray and how they didn\u2019t \u2018really warm to each other\u2019 until the 2013 Lions<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

It was a picture of a bandaged-up Vunipola that Erasmus used to take a swipe at Murray, calling the Saracens back-rower \u201ca proper club player\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cA week or so after Sarries beat Clermont in the Champions Cup final, word breaks that Billy Vunipola is out of the Lions tour,\u201d explained Murray in his book. \u201cBilly 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cApparently, he\u2019d been nursing a shoulder injury through the latter stages of the season with Sarries. On several websites carrying the story, there\u2019s a photo of Billy with his jersey off and his right shoulder wrapped in bandaging.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember after we\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cOut of the blue, he puts up on the projection screen one of the online reports about Vunipola\u2019s injury. It was accompanied by the picture of Billy with his bandaged shoulder. And Rassie\u2019s like, \u2018That\u2019s what a proper club player is\u2019.<\/p>\n

Ex-Ireland winger admits he was \u2018too scared to do extras after Leinster training\u2019<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cIt was definitely directed at me. As in, Billy Vunipola had played through the pain barrier for his club, but there\u2019s someone in the room who didn\u2019t. There was no one else in the room who\u2019d been touch-and-go with an injury for the Sarries match.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen he moved onto Munster business. It was done so quickly I wasn\u2019t sure at first what to make of it. But when I thought about it afterwards, he\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll 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\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Earlier in the chapter, Murray described Erasmus as \u201ca blunt, hard-nosed South African \u2013 you could tell he was an old-school Springbok from his confrontational attitude\u201d. He then went on to recall a fractious team meeting at Munster where the head coach \u2013 bad cop to assistant Jaques Nienaber\u2019s good cop style \u2013 flared up and banished a player from the set-up for a fortnight.<\/p>\n

Rassie Erasmus: Springboks have \u2018achieved nothing\u2019 with record All Blacks victory but will enjoy the celebrations<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen Rassie was bad, you\u2019d 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\u2019t paying full attention.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis 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. \u2018Do you think that\u2019s fucking funny?\u2019 There\u2019s a pause while our fella realises what\u2019s happening. \u2018Do you think it\u2019s funny?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cAll heads have turned to him now and he\u2019s flustered; he doesn\u2019t know what to say, and his smile is turning to embarrassment. Rassie\u2019s like: \u2018I\u2019ll tell you what\u2019s fucking funny. You can go back to your club for two weeks, because I\u2019m not joking here, I\u2019m not fucking around.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cJesus 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

READ MORE: Opinion: Rassie Erasmus\u2019 plan to \u2018unleash\u2019 confidence-lacking Damian Willemse pays massive dividends<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Retired Ireland and British and Irish Lions scrum-half Conor Murray has revealed what it was like to have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":426464,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4102],"tags":[83945,225,90462,12760,12,7405,4151,2196,79,16,15,4510],"class_list":{"0":"post-426463","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-rugby","8":"tag-conor-murray","9":"tag-home-page","10":"tag-internationals","11":"tag-munster","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-rassie-erasmus","14":"tag-rugby","15":"tag-south-africa","16":"tag-sports","17":"tag-uk","18":"tag-united-kingdom","19":"tag-united-rugby-championship"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115208780881301930","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=426463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426463\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/426464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=426463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=426463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=426463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}