Jeremy Davidson nurses a plastic pint beaker of Guinness under the grandstand at Stade Pierre Fabre. It is the Castres head coach' reward for an indomitable Champions Cup pool performance completed just an hour earlier for a narrow victory over Munster and it is well deserved. There were enough shortcomings in the Munster performance last Friday night to lay the blame for the 16-14 defeat squarely at the visitors’ dressing room door as they failed to repeat the win they had claimed here in January 2022.
Yet Ian Costello’s side was also undone by the remorseless efforts of a Castres pack assembled by the long-exiled Irishman through a some shrewdly acquired imports and carefully selected core plucked from France's second tier, the Pro D2. The former Ireland and 1997 Lions Test lock is a veteran of such modest team-building, a former Castres player forced to retire due to a knee injury at the age of 27 who after a spell at Dungannon was hired by the French club for his professional coaching role as an assistant in 2007. Yet his move back to his native Ulster on Mark McCall’s watch between 2009 and 2011 was his last employment at home, and his coaching career has continued uninterrupted and seemingly unnoticed by Irish rugby for the past 13 years, all of it in France.
Davidson spent six years maintaining Aurillac as a Pro D2 contender on a shoestring before the Top 14 came calling with the forwards coach post at Bordeaux-Bègles and onto the top job at Brive, whom he retu.