WITH the British & Irish Cup happily consigned to the record book, assuming anyone bothers to write it in, Moseley are now free to concentrate on preserving their Championship status.
That process resumes when they return to training tomorrow and begin in earnest their preparations for Boxing Day’s meeting with London Scottish, a match of immeasurable more significance.
The task will be to rediscover the urgency and accuracy of the two weeks prior to this inconvenient, irrelevant sideshow, qualities that brought them league wins over Doncaster and Esher.
Captain Adam Caves is confident they will be able to do just that after being given a week’s grace by an indulgent Billesley crowd, who nonetheless would have liked a few tries to sugar this pill.
And also by Kevin Maggs, their head coach who took a week off exhorting greater efforts from his men and instead encouraged them to express themselves. Not that they did.
“We have had this before where we have won a couple of games but unfortunately the B&I Cup has come along,” Caves said. “We sort of lose our way a bit because we are a side that ebbs and flows.
“Hopefully we have matured a bit as a side, we have pulled together and I would hope that we can take this, file this away and move back to where we were for the last two weeks.
“It’s difficult to turn up here on Saturday and think ‘We don’t have to win, we have got free rein as to the way Maggsy is allowing us to play.
“We took options we wouldn’t necessarily in a league fixture, a scrum when we would have kicked the three points and a couple of lineouts.
“Our mindset was completely different and that was reflected in the score.
“It wasn’t a pressure game, we don’t want to go far in the competition, we just wanted to give a good account of ourselves whereas they wanted to take this competition very seriously.”
Not that there was a lack of effort from Moseley, indeed they ripped into Munster in the opening exchanges and – with the mercurial Mike Ellery to the fore – might have opened the scoring had they asked Brad Davies to aim one of their early penalties at the sticks.
That they chose not to and came away with nothing is no more than an irritant, no more than frustrating that their set-piece wasn’t able to hold up when they turned to it.
But then by adopting a more risky strategy so early, Moseley sent out the message they were not desperate for victory. Once Munster discovered that they seemed emboldened.
But result aside, this was job done – no injuries and no tricky away quarter-final to negotiate.
And so on to the frying of bigger fish.
MOSELEY: Hughes; Brown, Hunt (Robinson, 64), MacBurnie, Gillick; Davies (Carter, 40), De La Harpe; O’Donnell (Warren, 62), Caves (Lowcock, 40), Quigley (Voisey, 68), Sanderson, Stott, Maltman (Mason, 64), Thomas, Ellery (Pennycook, 64)
MUNSTER: Scanlon; O’Dea, Chambers, Hanrahan (O’Mahoney, 64), Gleeson; Deasy, (Cusack, 74), Williams (Sheridan, 71); Kilcoyne, Henry (Casey, 62-78), Condon (Borlase, 64), Foley, Nagle, Holland, (Buckley, 74) O’Callaghan (O’Hara, 62), Butler.