The last group of Connacht players are set to arrive back in Ireland on Tuesday evening after a mammoth trip back from Siberia which saw them temporarily stranded in Moscow. The team were meant to be back in Shannon last Saturday evening but they had to cope with plane, visa and B.O issues as their return was delayed by days. It is all hardly ideal preparation considering their next game is against Brive this coming Saturday.

The Irish province saw off Krasnoyarsk's Enisei-STM 31-14 on Saturday in the Challenge Cup with the first leg of their 12,000 mile round-trip passing without incident though they did have to cope with temperatures of -27.C in Russia. The plans to deliver the team back home soon after the match seemed sound to the extent they held their team review of the match at 1am Russia time to combat jet lag but their chartered plane experienced technical difficulties.

The local technicians said it would take until Wednesday to get the required parts to fix the planes so they split the team into three groups to travel to Moscow and then onwards to Dublin via London, Paris and Amsterdam.

But they were held up in Moscow as their short-term visas had expired. A post on Connacht's Facebook page at 14.29 GMT on Monday read: "18 hours since the first group left hotel in Krasnoyarsk and three separate flights brought us all back together in Moscow Airport where we've been for almost eight hours, working through Visa issues and sorting flight connections.

"One group are currently checking in for Amsterdam, while the remainder wait for visa confirmation and potential flight to London."

Despite the setback, morale in the camp was sound with John Muldoon and Aly Muldowney providing updates via their Twitter accounts.

One group arrived in London on Monday evening ahead of their transfer back to Dublin on Tuesday morning and seemed in good spirits as they awaited their flight over the Irish sea.

The other two groups - with coach Pat Lam set to be one of the last to return as he was part of the final group to leave Moscow - should arrive back on Tuesday. Despite the logistical difficulties, Lam said it should not detract from teams journeying to Russia in the future but said the match should be earlier in the year to avoid the freezing conditions.

"It is just something that has happened. It was important that they staged a game in their home city, nobody planned for that plane to break down," Lam said in the Irish Independent. "But I definitely wouldn't have the game there again in November, we would need to do this in early September or October but that wasn't possible with the World Cup. It's tough to come in these conditions.

"It's a little bit of a dampener on a very good trip. We should have been home on Saturday night. Probably the worst news was trying to split the team into three, we didn't want to do that, but there was no guarantee the plane was going to be ready maybe till end of the week so it was the only way to get home and that was the priority.

"I am pretty proud of the management players and everybody is just getting on with it. It's been one challenge after another. One day we look back at it and say it made us tougher."