So, the season is right around the corner.

Well… I suppose it’s actually around two months away, which is right around the corner in, uhhh, cosmic terms. Anyway, I was asked during the week what Munster’s schedule looks like this season, and where opportunities might fall to experiment in certain positions, rotate key players, what games we need to target and where we’ll get targeted, and so on.

I tried doing this last year in quite an informal way by just assessing the teams based on what I reckoned about them, but that got me thinking. How do you assess the difficulty of a fixture list?

To start, you’ve got to assess the strength of teams you have to play in a scientific, measurable way. I figured the most logical way to do that was by looking at the last two regular seasons and knockouts in the URC only.

Here’s how I scored it:

• Per season score = (17 − regular-season rank) + playoff bonus (Champ=7, Finalist=5, Semi=3, QF=1).
• Recency weight: 2024/25 at 60%, 2023/24 at 40%.
• Scaled to 0–100.

URC Two-Season Strength Index

Team	Strength	24/25 (Rank/PO)	23/24 (Rank/PO)
Leinster	89.6	1 C	3 SF
Vodacom Bulls	87.0	2 F	2 F
Glasgow Warriors	76.5	4 SF	4 C
Munster	64.3	6 QF	1 SF
DHL Stormers	56.5	5 QF	5 QF
Hollywoodbets Sharks	49.6	3 SF	14 –
Edinburgh	40.9	7 QF	10 –
Benetton	37.4	10 –	7 QF
Scarlets	33.0	8 QF	13 –
Ospreys	30.4	12 –	8 QF
Cardiff Rugby	29.6	9 –	12 –
Lions	29.6	11 –	9 –
Ulster	28.7	14 –	6 QF
Connacht	20.9	13 –	11 –
Zebre Parma	7.0	15 –	16 –
Dragons RFC	6.1	16 –	15 –

Quick Notes:

• Elite now: Leinster, Bulls.
• Strong contenders: Glasgow (steady high), Munster (down a notch on 24/25 but strong two-year body of work).
• Consistent solid: Stormers.
• Biggest mover: Sharks (huge surge; two-year average still damped by 14th in 23/24).
• Sliding: Ulster (top-6 then 14th).

I think this seems pretty accurate. It feels like the proper ranking, and this is most of the value of a strength rating. What feels like a difficult game in advance of the season? Where do you need to focus your resources?

Of course, several factors are at play that can disrupt this ranking. Injuries in the Rugby Championships can hurt the South African sides, for example. Then you have to factor in the mental and physical toll that the Lions might have taken on teams like Leinster and Glasgow. Additionally, you must consider other variables, such as the Bulls and Connacht having a new head coach.

Will Connacht, for example, be as bad this season under Lancaster? Probably not. Will the Bulls struggle under the new style Johann Ackermann is sure to employ? Logic and history say, yeah, they probably will. If any side is decimated (in the literal and figurative sense) by injury during the season, results can spiral out of control quite quickly.

But, with all that said, I think this is the best we’ve got when it comes to assessing how difficult certain teams will be, while making sure we give caveats where they look like they’re needed.

Now, to properly assess the schedule itself. The schedule, as we know, includes x-factors like the difficulty of playing on the road, relative to playing at home, being weakened by test windows or playing against sides who are themselves weakened by them. So we’ll try to account for that too.

• Team strength = our two-year index (60% 24/25, 40% 23/24) + playoff bonus, scaled 0–100.
• Home/Away: ±7 (away is harder).
• Test windows: small Nov +2 (Stormers H); Six Nations: Zebre H +3, Sharks A +12, Bulls A +14 (travel/altitude).
• We play Leinster, Ulster, and Connacht twice; everyone else once. This is repeated for everyone else in their own shields.

Munster 2025/26 Strength-of-Schedule (SoS)

• Average difficulty per game: 44.1 (league baseline ≈ 41.5) → ~+6% harder than average.
• Home Avg: 27.9 | Away Avg: 60.2 (the road games drive the difficulty).
• Derby duplication effect:
  • Two vs Leinster adds +93.5 vs two “average” non-Irish fixtures at the same venues.
  • Two vs Ulster + Connacht subtract −72.4 (both below Leinster’s level), although this is purely on a numbers basis, interpros are always unpredictable.
  • Net derby uplift: +21.1 across the season (+1.2 per game).

Fixture Difficulty

Bands: Winnable <15 | Manageable 15–39 | Tricky 40–59 | Hard 60–79 | Very hard ≥80

• Sep 27 — Scarlets A: 40.0 (Tricky)
• Oct 4 — Cardiff H: 22.6 (Manageable)
• Oct 10 — Edinburgh H: 33.9 (Manageable)
• Oct 18 — Leinster A: 96.6 (Very hard)
• Oct 25 — Connacht H: 13.9 (Winnable)
• Nov 29 — Stormers H (+Nov): 51.5 (Tricky)
• Dec 20 — Ospreys A: 37.4 (Manageable)
• Dec 27 — Leinster H: 82.6 (Very hard)
• Jan 2 — Ulster A: 35.7 (Manageable)
• Jan 23 — Dragons H: −0.9 (Winnable)
• Jan 30 — Glasgow A: 83.5 (Very hard)
• Feb 28 — Zebre H (+6N): 3.0 (Winnable)
• Mar 21 — Sharks A (+6N): 68.6 (Hard)
• Mar 28 — Bulls A (+6N): 108.0 (Very hard)
• Apr 18 — Benetton A: 44.4 (Tricky)
• Apr 25 — Ulster H: 21.7 (Manageable)
• May 9 — Connacht A: 27.9 (Manageable)
• May 16 — Lions H: 22.6 (Manageable)

Month-by-Month Shape

• Sep–Oct: Mostly positive; only Leinster A is in the red zone of hard games. This is the prime points-banking window, which allows for breathing room in the middle block.
• Nov: Stormers H carries a small Test-window bump but is still at home.
• Late Dec–Jan: Spike—Leinster H, then Ulster A then Glasgow A (with a very winnable Dragons H at the end).
• Six Nations (Feb–Mar): One soft (Zebre H) then the decisive SA tour: Sharks A → Bulls A.
• Run-In (Apr–May): Benetton A is the banana skin; otherwise, it looks pretty favourable.

Primary Takeaways

• The schedule is a touch tougher than average, almost entirely due to playing Leinster twice and then the badly timed tour to SA during the Six Nations.
• Hitting 4–1 through R1–R5, surviving Dec–Jan at 2–2, and splitting South Africa likely secures a home quarter-final, depending on results elsewhere.

---

And that’s the aim, isn’t it? Home knockout games, leading to Munster winning the URC in either Thomond Park or Páirc Uí Chaoimh. From a financial and progression standpoint, home knockout games are the biggest boost in the club game.

In the URC, you earn those home knockouts by finishing in the top four or, ideally, in the top two.

So, if we know how strong our schedule is, and because we know who we’re playing and when, we can start to build a profile for the season. Plenty of teams do this. You can’t use your full-strength team for every single match of the season, and even if you could, you have to include your wider squad for a variety of positive reasons.

In the TOP14, teams like Toulouse are very selective in their usage of their full-strength side during the league campaign, and that often translates to a weird losing run that they pull around later in the season. Teams in the URC can’t really do that because it’s a shorter season compared to the TOP14 (26 games vs 18), so losses cost more than they do in France. This is why you’ll see the likes of Toulouse sending the espoirs away from home to play La Rochelle or Bordeaux, and why you don’t really see it in the URC — except when teams play Leinster. But I’ll come back to that in a minute.

First, let’s look at what points tally coincides with home knockouts.

From 2021/22 → 2024/25:

• Top-2 cut: 61, 68, 66, 68 → ~66–69 pts most years (aim for 68 to be safe).
• Top-4 cut: 58, 63, 65, 59 → ~60–62 pts.

What Munster need for a top-two seed

Two realistic routes hit ~68:

Route A (win heavy): 14–4 with 7–8 TBP wins and 1–2 losing BPs.
Route B (bonus heavy): 13–5 with 9 TBP wins and 2–3 losing BPs.

Either way, we must:

• Split Leinster (win the home derby).
• Take care of all home games vs non-elite (and turn most of them into 5-pointers).
• Extract 2–3 BPs from the red-zone away nights (Leinster/Glasgow/SA tour).

Fixture-by-fixture points budget to reach ~68

(Keep in mind that I’m using our derby-aware difficulty, ±7 home/away differential, Test windows, SA tour and the general SoS we determined earlier)

Bank 5 (target TBP wins):
Cardiff H, Edinburgh H, Connacht H, Dragons H, Zebre H (6N), Lions H → 6 × 5 = 30 pts

Win, 4–5 pts (push for at least three TBPs among these):
Scarlets A, Ospreys A, Ulster A, Connacht A, Benetton A, Ulster H, Stormers H (Nov) → 7 × 4 = 28 pts
Add +3 by turning any three of these into 5-pointers — best candidates: Scarlets A, Ospreys A, Stormers H.

Red-zone / LBP management:
Leinster A, Glasgow A, Sharks A (6N), Bulls A (6N).
Target ≥2 LBPs here (Leinster A, Glasgow A most plausible), accept 0 at Loftus if needed → +2 pts.

Leinster H (swing):
Win (4 pts). If it turns into a TBP, you’re ahead of pace.

That ledger = 30 + 28 + 3 + 2 + 4 = 67. One more TBP or extra LBP anywhere tips you to 68–69.

What to Prioritise (and what to de-emphasise)

Prioritise / Chase The Fiver:

• Home vs Cardiff, Edinburgh, Connacht, Dragons, Zebre, Lions.
• Stormers H (Nov): both under Test drain → treat like a 5-pointer opportunity.
• Scarlets A & Ospreys A: these are your away TBP shots if the game state allows.

These are the games where, injury allowing, you go as strong as you possibly can to get ahead of the points curve. Last season, we lost to Edinburgh at home, with losses to Cardiff and Zebre on the road, and I think we had all three games down for 14 points. Instead, we got four. If we got the points we’d budgeted from those games, we would have finished fourth, even if everything else stayed the same.

There is scope for some rotation in some of these games — Edinburgh, Cardiff, Lions — and heavy rotation in others, like Dragons and Zebre at home, but for the most part, these are games that you chase hard with a strong core that you can sub off early if needs be. This collection of games is your bread and butter, so you chase after them with that in mind.

Must win for seeding leverage:

• Leinster H (four-point swing in the derby head-to-head).
• Benetton A (banana skin vs a top-8 side; a 4 here is huge for the aggregate).

No matter what we do, we have to win these games. We can’t get to 68 points on this schedule without beating Leinster and beating Benetton away from home in April. The Benetton game is achievable. Difficult, but doable. Especially after a Six Nations where they are likely to have a large number of players involved with Italy, so injuries might play a part here. If injuries allow, we have to target this game like it’s a Champions Cup knockout.

Manage/lessen Importance (rotation, LBP hunting):

• Leinster A, Glasgow A — keep it within 7 for the LBP if the win isn’t on.
• SA tour during Six Nations:
  • Sharks A → go after the LBP; if selection breaks your way, a smash-and-grab 4 is a bonus.
  • Bulls A (Loftus) → protect the group; 0–1 pt expectation.

Trap Games:

• Ulster A and Connacht A — 4 points here are the difference between 5th and 2nd.
• Ulster H — should be 4; missing this forces you to find points on the road.

Getting to 68 points isn’t easy. It should be hard, and it is.

There’s no escaping the big point on this schedule; we have to beat Leinster.

That’s been something of a nightmare for Munster in the last ten years or more, and particularly in the last few years. For the most part, I think that’s been down to Leinster being a better and deeper squad in the last five years, but also that they’ve been able to manage their schedule much better than we have.

Why? Injuries. They’ve mostly been healthy for the first half of the season — when both Munster/Leinster games are normally played — and we have not been, either for that game directly or in the games leading up to it, either in Dublin or Thomond Park. This doesn’t mean “excuses” for why Munster lose these games, although our injury list in the last few years is as good an excuse as there is.

It means that weaker teams and subsequent weaker performances in the formative stages of the URC have warped the rest of our league season. Essentially, if you lose two/three of your first six games, rather than just one, you’re already seriously behind for the rest of the season, so you’ve got to burn more of your top guys’ minutes, which leads to more injuries and subsequent banker games turning into pressure cookers.

Last season, Munster lost four out of six, which put the entire season underwater before the November test window.

The Maths

Recent URC cut-lines for 8th have been 48–50 pts.
So Munster’s bad start last season meant the following matrix applied for the remaining 12 games:

*Two wins = 8 pts before bonuses.

From a 2–4 start, Munster needed to play the final 12 games at 75–83% win rate, or ~3.2–3.4 points per game, which is home-QF form across the last 12 games of the season, with no head coach and an injury list that looked like the team bus had ran into a ditch at some point.

So, basically, when the home game against Leinster came around, not only were we suffering with key injuries, but we were also pushing against the tide of the season to that point. We needed to be playing like a top-four side while languishing in tenth or lower. We were way behind where we needed to be, knew the momentum at stake, and also knew the damage that would follow from a loss, so the game was incrementally more difficult. That’s before the fact that Leinster’s excellent season to that point allowed them to budget key players for Thomond Park like Joe McCarthy, James Ryan, Caelan Doris, Josh Van Der Flier, Robbie Henshaw, Garry Ringrose and Andrew Porter.

They were able to target this game in a way that they otherwise wouldn’t have, because there was valuable momentum at stake. And because Leinster were mostly healthy, they didn’t need to use guys like Sheehan, Snyman, Gibson-Park, Lowe or Barrett to do it, so it was as good a five points as they earned all season.

So the question is this: if we need to beat Leinster in Thomond Park, and we play them in Round 4 in Croke Park, sandwiched between Edinburgh and Connacht, two games we really need to be chasing five points in, do you “punt” Leinster away to keep yourself on track?

I’m often asked this during the season, and I will be again this season.

In essence, why don’t we do what Toulouse would do in the TOP14, and send a shadow side to Croke Park to go strong the week after against Connacht?

Does it even make sense?

No. Well, not really.

Here’s the way to frame the Leinster-away/Connacht-home block between Rounds 4 and 5 if we’re serious about getting that 68 points, with the points trade-off that comes with each approach.

Leinster in Dublin is a low-ceiling night for most visiting sides, and it certainly has been for Munster in the last few years. Even with our best 23, the realistic target is a one-score game and a losing bonus point, with a small chance to nick four. Now there is the x-factor of Leinster’s test core being on a Lions cooldown — either not playing or mentally/physically degraded — but we can’t predict that in advance. If we see Leinster looking weak or with a bunch of injuries, that’s one thing, but it doesn’t change our fundamental approach.

A week later, Connacht at home is the opposite of what Leinster have been traditionally: a high-ceiling fixture where five points are genuinely on the table if you lean into it. Treat the two games as a single, linked problem: optimise the total points yield across the block, not just the headline of either week.

That points us towards selective rotation in Dublin, not a white flag. Keep the spine on the pitch, and rotate around it. Cap key forward minutes at 50–60, use a 6–2 bench if you want to wrestle the middle third, and play for the one-point floor without carrying unnecessary load or risk. Seven days later, empty the tank at home. Connacht (H) is a table lever: strongest available 23, attack bench (5–3), tempo for four tries, and game-management in the final quarter to squeeze the bonus.

The expected points back it.

Roughly: Leinster (A) yields ~1.1–1.3 pts at full tilt, ~0.9–1.1 with smart rotation; Connacht (H) yields ~4.7–4.9 at full tilt, ~4.5–4.7 with light rotation. Add it up over the pair and you get three clear options:

• Selective rotate at Leinster + full-tilt Connacht: ~5.7 pts (best blend).
• Push hard in both: ~5.6 pts (tiny gain in Dublin, small risk to the home ceiling).
• Punt Dublin + full-tilt Connacht: ~5.2 pts (you give away too much in Dublin to justify it).

There’s a psychological layer to all this, too. I think sometimes people see the loss to Leinster in the Aviva and Croke Park, feel the pain of it, and assume that the pain (or media heat that comes with it) would be lessened if Munster sent up an academy team. I really don’t think it would. I see the logic behind it, but that’s giving the fixture in Croke Park too much power.

Plus, you don’t hand Leinster a free hit. They’ll have issues of their own with a South African tour inside the first two games, and then the Sharks in Dublin when they come back, before facing us a week later. You also don’t let the derby dictate your season. Keeping the set-piece and game-management core intact signals intent; rotating one back-row, a wing, or the midfield is pragmatic, not an automatic surrender.

Then we have to follow it by treating Connacht (H) like a cup tie: four points is the minimum, five is the target.

In short, we have to contest in Dublin, chase Connacht hard back in Limerick. 

On average, it’s the highest-yield path — turning a very hard fixture and one we really should be winning into a seven-to-eight-point block over two weeks, is exactly the kind of steady accumulation that separates a home quarter-final side from the URC mosh pit.

From there, we can look to squeeze Leinster after an arduous test window in November, where all of their Lions are going to be sent to the well again, before playing Leicester, Ulster and then ourselves back to back towards the end of December. Their home game against Ulster might be the one where they use some of their test players’ minutes, but even then, those minutes will be strictly limited.

Last season, Leinster were able to fully rotate at home against Connacht (who were on an awful run at the time), the week before going to Thomond Park. This year, that won’t be possible. The opportunity is there, if we start well, to get the points we need before the likely dead zone of the Six Nations, where we typically picked up a lot of points in the last three seasons.

The path is there; we just have to follow it.