Peter Jackson's Round 4 review

A numbing weekend in the refrigerator has left England's dwindling survivors in danger of being frozen out of the quarter-finals.

Despite Siberian conditions in Brussels preventing the Heineken from reaching parts that other tournaments have never dreamt about, Round 5 amounted to a lot more than Munster ridiculing any obituary notices of their demise as a European force and all that baloney.

The most startling scenario was not that they crushed Perpignan beneath the bluest of skies in a way which the French champions had never been crushed before, nor that 30,000 defied sub-zero temperatures in Toulouse the previous day to see Cardiff off the premises without further mishap.

Results elsewhere may yet conspire to leave England, the most successful country in the history of the competition, without a single club in the last eight and the only time that has ever happened was because of their infamous boycott when Ulster won eleven seasons ago.

London Irish ought to avert a complete wipe-out as due reward for finding the nerve to beat Leinster in Dublin but they still have to beat the Scarlets in Llanelli and sock it to the holders again at the Madejski the following week to be absolutely sure. A weekend which confirmed the exit of three other Guinness Premiership teams, Bath, Harlequins, Gloucester,
leaves the other three, Northampton, Leicester and Sale, still in contention of sorts.

All three would have been in with a bigger shout had they not lost ground despite winning. The Saints failed to secure a try bonus point at Treviso, then flew home to watch Munster seize command of Pool 1, their obliteration of Perpignan destroying fond hopes of the French champions doing them a mighty favour. They are next up at Franklin's splendid Gardens in the New Year when a home win will not alter the grim reality that Northampton will have to Munster in Limerick if they are to make the last eight.

Leicester are in for a similar do-or-die climax to the pool competition against the Ospreys in Swansea. The margins in such a ferociously competitive tournament are so fine that the Tigers' failure to deny Clermont a losing bonus point clears the way for last season's French runners-up to finish top provided they take all ten points on offer at home to the Ospreys, a tall order, followed by the formality of five more at Viadana. Lose to the Michelin Men and the under-achieving Welsh region
will be entitled to feel they owe Leicester something when the best of Anglo-Welsh enemies collide at the Liberty.

Sale also missed a trick by making harder work of Harlequins at home than they had done the previous week at The Stoop. Dropping a try-bonus point leaves them requiring nothing less than wins at Cardiff in the penultimate round followed by another against Toulouse at Edgeley Park in the potential decider. Even if at least one English club qualifies as one of the two highest-placed runners-up, the likelihood is that no Premiership team will go through as a pool winner, an unprecedented state of affairs.

Leicester have done so seven times, Bath four, Wasps three, Quins, Northampton and Gloucester twice, Newcastle, London Irish and Saracens once. As the pool stage approaches its denouement, the French and Irish are in position to monopolise at least five, if not six, of the eight places. Biarritz, ten points clear of Gloucester in Pool 2, are on course for top seeding in Europe, a surprising reversal of their sliding domestic form after losing five of their last six matches in Le
Championnat.

Edinburgh's flimsy prospects of rectifying the Heineken's last eight as a perenially Scottish-free zone hinges on beating Ulster at Ravenhill, then doing the same to Stade Francais at Murrayfield while clinging to the forlorn hope of Quins upsetting the trend-setting Parisians in France just as they did last year before their rise amongst the big players in Europe
dissolved into the scandal of the fake blood capsule which did for Dean Richards.

Stade have poured too much sweat to fail now, what with Guazzini lending a presidential hand to shovel snow off the pitch at the Stade Jean Bouin in Paris where 2,500 watched their avenging win over Ulster instead of 40,000
in Brussels.

A fraught weekend has them back in charge of their own destiny which is more than can be said about the other team in pink, the Cardiff Blues, on the day their oldest Lion 'came out.' Far from building on their achievement last season when denied a place in the final only by the cruellest of circumstances, their pointless skirmish with a Toulouse team distinctly ordinary by their standards suggested they have still to get over the misery of the penalty shoot-out against
Leicester last May.

In their desperation to retrieve a lost cause, they sent Gareth Thomas into belated action after the former Lions captain
admitted to being gay but with no time to do more than take two passes and chase a few garryowens.

By contrast, Munster showed what real champions are made of 24 hours later some 200 kilometres away in Perpignan where the lions in the Coliseum had only a marginally better chance of living to tell the tale than visiting teams to the Stade Aime Giral. Having decided it was high time the real Munster stood up to show that reports of their decline were even more
premature than Mark Twain's obituary, they left the No. 1 team in France in bits.

Nobody had ever crushed Perpignan on their own ground in the Heineken more comprehensively. Wasps may have won there by a bigger margin, 34-6 six years ago, but Lawrence Dallaglio's outstanding team did not impose the level of control that day which Paul O'Connell's Munster managed on Sunday afternoon in just about the only corner of France where the temperature rose above freezing.

Who could have imagined that after conceding three tries at home the previous week but still deservedly scraping through that they would overwhelm Perpignan with four of their own. In doing so, Munster showed yet again that they have one quality above all, the insatiable hunger of true champions epitomised by players like David Wallace and Alan Quinlan
but none more so than O'Connell himself.

'It was a very big win in the context of how we had been playing,' he said before hurrying straight home to Limerick. 'Sometimes you can over-analyse yourselves and the harder you try, the worse it can get. It can all turn round in one big game and while this is a great achievement, we've a long way to go to be up to Leinster's standard but we are heading in the right direction.'

Nothing bugs Munster more than any reference to their status as former Heineken champions. If hunger wins big tournaments, they will be there at the Stade de France next May...