At Franklin’s Gardens, Northampton won a thrilling Champions Cup match by nine tries, leaving Munster captain Tadhg Beirne to lament costly defensive mistakes.
With two tries from wings Calvin Nash and Diarmuid Kilgallen guaranteeing a thrilling conclusion, the home team was clinging to a slim victory in the closing minutes.
However, the English team secured first place in Pool 3 thanks to a hat-trick from Saints wing Tom Seabrook and additional goals from Curtis Langdon and James Ramm.
After blowing a golden opportunity to guarantee a high seeding yesterday, Munster will travel for the third consecutive season before the April last-16 round.
I think we’re very good when we’re good. When we’re poor, we’re being extremely poor, Beirne stated. The frustrating thing is that we have to be really good for much longer periods of time in the game.
This group believes in what we can accomplish; it’s about putting in the effort and ideally doing it for 80 minutes.
We’ll be hard to live with when we do do that. I think we showed snippets of that in today’s game.
To still concede five tries, it’s pretty disappointing. What might look like a really good try to the average supporter, we’re looking at that as a terrible try to concede in terms of our systems. That’s the stuff that we’ll be frustrated with