IT felt like we were victims of the luck of the Irish last week but hopefully things will be different against Connacht tomorrow evening.

We go to Galway after being beaten by Guinness PRO12 leaders Munster in Cork and I don't think the 45-17 scoreline was a totally fair representation of the game.

The week of build-up went well but it was one of those games where you almost feel sorry for yourselves after 20 minutes; we did a lot of good things but one or two moments didn't go our way and we couldn't recover from that against the best defence in the league.

Certain decisions were frustrating but Munster can be an intimidating environment for the officials and while a few calls went against us, we certainly aren't blaming our defeat on the officials.

You talk about winning the critical moments and one came with the score at 10-3 when we were attacking on their line with penalty advantage but their fly-half Tyler Bleyendaal intercepted.

It was a bit like Dan Biggar against England but unfortunately Munster, unlike Wales, managed to go down the other end and score.

If he hadn't picked that pass off then we would have been over to make it at least 10-8 but instead we were down 17-3.

That's a massive swing and it's heartbreaking to look up as a forward to see a quality player like Bleyendaal making a quality defensive read to race away.

There was another similarity to the Six Nations game at the death when a clearance kick was run back against unstructured defence for a Munster try, which was a shame because we had drawn the second half and it was a shame to finish in that fashion.

There were a lot of positives from our performance but we aren't kidding ourselves, we know that they were outweighed by negatives.

We have to get something out of Connacht and we have already beaten them before this season at Rodney Parade, so have to be confident.

They like to play pretty expansive rugby and we will have a referee who likes to encourage a free-flowing game in Nigel Owens.

You know that you will get a good game with Nigel and he is great from a captain's point of view because he talks to you, has empathy and uses common sense.

By the book he should perhaps sometimes blow but he wants to see the game flow while he also allows a jackal.

If we do decide to go with both Ollie Griffiths and Nic Cudd in the back row then we have two outstanding 7s who like to get their noses over the ball and disrupt things.

Hopefully it will be a good game out there – although that's always massively weather-dependent with how the wind blows in Galway – and we have to be positive.

It was an important win when we beat Connacht earlier in the season to back up our Rodney Parade win against Brive. We did that with a quality defensive performance with lots of line speed and will need the same again this weekend.