We remember the big plays and we mistake them for the big picture: the try, the kick, the break, the turnover. Each one a moment on which we can hang our tiny understanding of why one team won and the other didn’t.

Rugby, though, of all sports, challenges our minds to look again and consider the little pictures. The hard yards that are measured out in savagely contested inches. For long spells yesterday Munster couldn’t have survived without an incredible defence. And they couldn’t have contemplated winning without their pack of dogs.

None of that was flash or fancy: all of it was about winning.

Our eyes were drawn time and again to Alan Quinlan. Not because his effort exceeded any of the other seven forwards, but maybe because there is something quintessentially Munster about him. The knockbacks and the comebacks. The hard-edge and the cuteness.

Yesterday morning the former Munster player John Kelly spoke about the ‘hit hard’ mentality of Munster. How the first big collision stakes out their ground and seeks to make a statement: “Each member of Munster’s 15,” he wrote in the Irish Examiner, “will want to set the tone for the rest of the match with this first point of contact.”

As the first whistle sounded no priority will have been more urgent in Quinlan’s mind. The game was barely two minutes old when he nailed Thierry Dusautoir just inside the Toulouse half. It was merely one tackle among hundreds, but the symbolism of it was unmistakable. On this ground seven months ago Dusautoir was the hero of France’s triumph over New Zealand in the World Cup quarter-final, terrorising the All Blacks with nearly 40 tackles. He sat out Toulouse’s win in the Heineken Cup semi-final because of his father’s death but the significance of his return this week was recognised by everybody.

Quinlan would have known all that. Toulouse spun the ball across the line from their first possession and the Munster No 6 centred Dusautoir in his crosshairs. First he stopped him: then he drove him back. The Frenchman was conceding nearly a stone and a half and Quinlan made him feel every ounce of the deficit. It said everything about how Munster intended to proceed, and Quinlan was the perfect man to articulate that message.

For more than a decade Quinlan has been a streetfighter in the best Munster traditions. Like all blindside wing forwards he plays in that blurred area between lawful and lawless, between getting away with it and being pinged for penalties.

Though he understands the risks he would say that there was no margin for him in playing safe. So, he plays on the edge and takes his chances. Quinlan will be 34 this summer and his career has been haunted by injuries that might have finished lesser men. Instead he refuses to be put down. Yesterday, he was irrepressible.

Consider his role in Munster’s first try. Toulouse had just escaped a brush with the Television Match Official and had the put-in to a five-metre scrum. Munster got a shove on them, Tomas O’Leary snapped at the heels of Byron Kelleher and Quinlan did a number on Shaun Sowerby. Munster forced a turnover and as the bodies were slowly leaving the contact zone Paul O’Connell went immediately to congratulate Quinlan.

A minute later Denis Leamy forced his way over the tryline with Quinlan in convoy. Did he bind and drive before Leamy had been tackled? Probably. Would Leamy have made it over the whitewash without a shove from Quinlan? Probably not. What were the chances of him being penalised? Slim. In his mind, no contest.

Jean-Baptiste Elissalde played a looping re-start into midfield, giving his chasers every chance. Quinlan stood under the ball, caught it, took the hits and retained possession.

Everything he had done in the previous three minutes was bread-and-butter stuff and all of it was crucial. But Quinlan is much more than a dogged worker. He’s smart too. Early in the match yesterday he read one of Kelleher’s passes and took a punt. From the interception he scampered 40 metres down field at a time in the game when his side still hadn’t settled and desperately needed to lift the siege.

For a grizzly old wing forward he has a sense of adventure, too.

When the teams were level mid-way through the second half there was a chance for Munster to take a quick 22 drop out.

Toulouse were light on numbers down the blindside and Marcus Horan saw the space. He sprinted 20 metres but in the time it took to cover that ground he thought better of making the play.

Quinlan was close by and you didn’t need to hear what he was saying to know that he was furious. Horan threw the ball at him in a way that didn’t end the argument. So Quinlan took the quick drop-out himself and forced a penalty. Of course it was risky and a turnover there would have been suicidal. But he gambled, and it paid off again.

It’s not just Quinlan’s teammates who must listen to his opinions though. In the art of sledging he is a master. When the Toulouse captain, Fabien Pelous, kicked him in the backside early in the second half the only rational conclusion was Quinlan had said something. Pelous said that Quinlan had stood on his foot. Maybe it was both. Either way Quinlan had been an irritant and that has been the substance of his outstanding career.

A dog that barked and a dog that bit.