THE tragic and untimely death of Anthony Foley in Paris cast a pall over the opening weekend of European competition, and the loss of the Munster coach will be at the forefront of the minds of everyone who attends the Irish province’s Champions Cup match against Glasgow Warriors on Saturday. At the time of writing, the arrangements for the funeral of the 42-year-old had yet to be finalised, and for as long as it persists that uncertainty is also sure to have an effect on the preparations for the game at Thomond Park in Limerick.

It is the second year running that events in the French capital have led to the postponement of Racing 92’s first pool match; on a Friday night last November the Glasgow squad were already in Paris ahead of the match due to take place the following day when the terrorist attacks began at the Stade de France and in the city itself. While the immediate thoughts of everyone in such circumstances are with the families of those who lost their lives, it is the coaches of the clubs involved who must, by the very nature of their jobs, be among the first to return to the everyday practicalities of sport.

Munster announced yesterday that they provisionally plan to hold a press conference today. The Warriors squad have resumed their normal training schedule following their exhilarating 42-13 victory over Leicester Tigers at Scotstoun on Friday night. Life goes on.

Even so, there is clearly an extra element - thankfully a very unusual one - which coaches have to take into account when planning for their team’s first match following such tragedies. The atmosphere at such a match is likely to be sombre and subdued, at least at first, so how do they prepare their players to adapt? Can there be a collective mood among the squad, or do different players need to be handled in different ways?

A significant percentage of players experience personal bereavement at some point in their careers, and the amount of time out they feel they need can vary widely. But when your whole squad is involved it is a different matter.

This is just one of the ways in which the role of a coach or manager or director of rugby has become immeasurably more complex and demanding than it was, say, 30 years ago. Even back then, the best coaches were alive to the sensitivities of their players, although nowadays things have changed to such an extent that it could easily be argued that emotional intelligence is a more valuable quality in a coach than tactical insight.

Having said that, Gregor Townsend at Glasgow, Munster director of rugby Rassie Erasmus and their counterparts at Racing and Leicester will at some stage have to make cold calculations about how the revised fixture schedule will affect their hopes of qualifying for the quarter-finals of the cup. Last season, the Racing-Warriors game was reconvened for early January, with the home team winning 34-10, and there was a case for suggesting that the French club, who went on to reach the final, were always going to be too strong for the Warriors at home no matter when the match was played. But it could equally be argued that if you are going to cause an upset against one of the richest clubs in Europe the best time to do it is in the opening match - when they can afford to lose, and when, perhaps, they are most likely to underestimate you.

The positive thing for Glasgow, given that bonus-point win over Leicester, is that, hypothetically at least, their route to the knockout stages remains the most straightforward possible: win all five of their remaining games and they will progress as group winners. Where it gets complicated, of course, is if and when they lose a match and have to start thinking about the sort of points total that would take them through as one of the three best runners-up.

When the Heineken Cup had six pools, with the winners and two best runners-up progressing, it was at times difficult enough to work out who was likely to go through as the best of the rest and especially what their seeding would be. Now the competition has been reduced to five pools and a total of 20 teams, with three also-rans reaching the last eight, there are many more permutations, which sometimes all remain in place even going into the last round of fixtures.

In practice, though, there has invariably been a good guide to which pools will see two teams progress: they’re the ones with Italian teams in them. The number of Italian representatives in European rugby’s premier competition has now been cut from two to one, but the fact that Zebre lost 82-14 to Wasps in their opening Pool 2 game suggests there has been no change to that. Unless Zebre have a massive upturn in their fortunes, they will remain the whipping boys of the pool, and the top two out of Wasps, Connacht and Toulouse will go through.

Pool 1, by contrast, will be far more keenly contested. No matter when the Racing-Munster game is eventually played, the question of who qualifies from it may well not be decided until the final minutes of the final match.