Tick the box and move on to the next challenge is the modus operandi of every professional rugby set-up and Munster do that this morning as thoughts immediately turned to the PRO14 campaign and the next four league games missing 11 players required for Ireland’s Six Nations title defence.

Yet while head coach Johann van Graan implements his now customary resetting of the clock to zero hours and turns his attention to next Saturday’s trip to face the struggling Dragons, it is only right to linger awhile on the manner of Munster’s progress to an 18th quarter-final in European club rugby’s premier competition.

Qualification for the business end of the Champions Cup should not be taken for granted and credit where credit’s due, for Munster to have emerged top of Pool 2 having seen off Castres, the champions of France, and English league leaders Exeter, as well as their Premiership rivals Gloucester was no mean feat.

Nor too, the impressive way in which both club and individual players have rebounded from a difficult couple of weeks in mid-December when below-par performances on the road resulted in defeats at Castres in Europe and Ulster in the PRO14 threatened to derail the 2018-19 campaign.

As a body of work, Munster’s last four performances over successive weeks to first defeat inter-provincial and league rivals Leinster and Connacht and then European pool challengers Gloucester and Exeter have offered all manner of variations on the art of winning rugby matches.

Saturday night’s engrossing arm-wrestle with the Chiefs was possibly the least pretty of the quartet but what it lacked in fluency and execution it certainly made up for in terms of substance, not least the three nerveless penalty kicks converted by Joey Carbery that ultimately proved the difference between the sides. The third of them, Carbery’s 20th successful kick in a row since that 13-12 loss at Castres, was the epitome of grace under pressure, his side trailing 7-6 with eight minutes to go. At that stage, Munster were already through, with a losing bonus point all that was required to top the group but a converted try by Exeter would have stolen Pool 2 from their grasp and the sell-out 26,276 crowd were silently willing Carbery to relieve their stress.

The pressure valve had been released considerably six minutes earlier when the province’s line-out strategist Billy Holland had been sprung from the bench as replacement for man-of-the-match Tadhg Beirne as his side faced another five-metre attacking lineout from the Chiefs, who had been camped on the home tryline following a superb touch-finder kick into the corner from scrum-half Nic White. Yet, Holland’s steal at the tail, having been launched into the air by CJ Stander and fellow 66th-minute replacement Jeremy Loughlin, ended the siege and switched the tide back in Munster’s favour.

“They were very clinical in their lineout delivery in the first half, especially that try of theirs,” van Graan said of Exeter’s 13th-minute score through flanker Don Armand off a driving maul.

We had a look at it at half-time, just the coaches, and we devised our plan and as it came, Billy read it and also the two (lifting) supporters. I thought that moment turned the tide. We mauled straight from there and it’s special players that deliver special performances and I thought one to 23 did it.

So Munster progress for the third season in a row, and a competition-record 18th time since their first trip to the knockout stages in 1998-99. It is a consistent return that rivals often marvel at and Chiefs’ director of rugby Rob Baxter also pointed to the consistency of the Irish side’s performances over the six rounds of this season’s pool competition that had begun with a 10-10 draw at Exeter’s Sandy Park on October 13.

Baxter said: “They’ve very consistent, very good in the key basic areas of defence, around contact and set-piece. Once those fundamentals are in place and the guys around understand how it all works. It gives you such a solid foundation that makes you difficult to beat. That’s a key element.

We tend to have that most weeks and that’s why we were tough to beat and that’s why we do well in the Premiership. We don’t always do it in Europe, we tend to go off-script a little bit too much. Munster are very good at staying on script, driving through things and not relenting under pressure and forcing wins like they did today.”

Following the previous week’s bells and whistles bonus-point victory at Gloucester’s Kingsholm, this was altogether harder-earned and van Graan declared himself satisfied with the manner of both.

Asked if he thought he had a better team now than when entering the knockout stages a year ago, just two months into his tenure as head coach, van Graan replied: “I’d like to think so. How we dealt with the pressure over the last four weeks was special. It was all different kinds of games.

“This one was a pressure-cooker. So, obviously, with such a long way to go in this competition. And now we have a two-month break. I think that’s the key thing, 11 lads will go away now but we’ve got to keep improving, keep working on our fitness and our individual skills.

The guys that stay behind will need to improve again. Hopefully, we get out of the Six Nations well and then once we reassemble somewhere close to the end of March, it’s

literally going to be three training sessions and then we’re into a quarter-final.”

MUNSTER:

M Haley; A Conway, C Farrell, R Scannell (D Goggin, 58), K Earls; J Carbery, C Murray (A Mathewson, 67); D Kilcoyne (J Loughman, 66), N Scannell (R Marshall, 72), J Ryan (S Archer, 55); J Kleyn, T Beirne (B Holland, 66); P O’Mahony - captain, T O’Donnell (A Botha, h-t), CJ Stander.

Replacement not used:

T Bleyendaal.

EXETER CHIEFS:

J Nowell; S Cordero, H Slade, O Devoto (I Whitten, 58), T O’Flaherty; J Simmonds, N White; A Hepburn (B Moon, 53), J Yeandle - captain (L Cowan-Dickie, 58), H Williams (G Holmes, 67); D Dennis (M Lees, 50), J Hill; S Skinner, D Armand, M Kvesic.

Replacements not used:

S Lonsdale, J Maunder, G Steenson.

Referee:

Jérome Garcès (France).