Pick up the pen
A pen, tossed across an office floor in Limerick. That’s the scene everyone will remember from the extract of Peter O’Mahony’s autobiography, released ahead of the book hitting shelves on Thursday.
It was a few weeks after Ireland’s quarter-final exit at the 2023 World Cup. O’Mahony, then Munster captain, sat down with Graham Rowntree, the province’s head coach. According to O’Mahony, Rowntree threw a pen on the floor and told him to pick it up, to prove how stiff he’d become. Then he backtracked instantly. Only joking, apparently.
O’Mahony didn’t find it funny. He had worn the red jersey since he was 18, and he describes the moment as humiliating. The meeting ended right there.
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“Your body is broken”
Underneath it all was a contract. O’Mahony’s IRFU central deal ran out in the summer of 2024. The union was willing to chip in towards his salary but, given his age, wouldn’t cover all of it anymore. Munster were supposed to make up the difference. His agent, the book claims, heard nothing back from the coaching staff.
Eventually Rowntree picked up the phone himself. There would be no place for him the following season. His body wasn’t up to it. The club would give him a send-off the year after.
O’Mahony was “furious”. Six months earlier he’d played 80 minutes of a World Cup quarter-final. Now he was surplus to requirements? He still had his eye on the 2025 Lions tour. His take is short and sharp: it’s business, fine, but it’s bad business.
Second book, same target
Rowntree has been here before. Conor Murray took aim at his time in charge in his own autobiography back in September 2025.
And yet the silverware is hard to argue with. Rowntree won the URC with Munster in 2023, the province’s first trophy since 2011, with O’Mahony leading the side out in Cape Town against the Stormers. Seventeen months later, in October 2024, Rowntree was sacked. He’s now coaching the Urayasu D-Rocks in Japan.
O’Mahony kept going until May 2025. Somewhere in between, he captained Ireland to the 2024 Six Nations title.
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