Leinster are better than Munster right now.

I don’t think that’s controversial. I will posit that I think a slightly stronger Munster selection in one or two areas – midfield and second-row – might have tilted this tight contest our way but that’s just fantasy matchmaking. In the real world, Leinster’s Category 1 team are just that bit better than our Category 1 team and their Category 2 team mixed with a few key starters is better than our Category 2 team with a few regular starters.

Accepting that is the first step to improving.

There’s no faulting our work rate. There’s no doubting that the lads care. But the extra quality Leinster had – in their starting pack in particular – made the difference for them, in my opinion.

And look, the scoreboard was pretty tight and we certainly weren’t helped by our poor start, the difficult wind conditions in the first half and a few iffy defensive moments in the first and third quarters but I think that’s a fair enough reading of the game as a whole.

After a few watch backs, I also got the feeling that we started to go away from some of the structures and shapes that have worked well for us earlier in the season and reverted to a game that, in a lot of ways, played into Leinster’s strengths as the game wore on.

We were trying to run over Leinster as they compressed into their 22 towards the endgame and when you’re trying to overpower these guys coming around the corner, it just won’t work. Add in a malfunctioning lineout towards the end and look, you’re going to struggle to make headway. There’ll be turnovers, there’ll be spills in contact, there’ll be multiple tight sequences where you don’t make gainline and go backwards. But we know this – we’ve seen this already in big games over the last two seasons. The personnel might have changed for Leinster here but it changed for us too and while lads like Josh Murphy and Will Connors might not be the biggest names right now, they’re 6’6″/6’5″ respectively, big men and big hitters on top of it.

When I was watching this game back, I got serious echoes of our game against Racing 92 and when I thought about it a bit more, Leinster’s forward selection echoed a lot of what worked for Racing in that game. They put an awful lot of pressure on our lineout, got consistent reliable possession from their three different targets and used their power outside backs to consistently pressure our defensive reloads before really challenging us physically up the middle of the field.

In a game where the pattern was dictated by the strong wind, I felt that Leinster handled the conditions better.

In the first half, they were happy to pin us into our own 22 and watch our box kick exits stand up in the wind. The wind really picked up speed higher up so McCarthy’s box kicks would go forward around 5m/10m before hanging in the gale and then dropping down vertically.

We didn’t win enough of these contests. The net effect of this was that Munster had a lot of possession but no territory.

We tried to play out of our own half but we didn’t win enough collisions to give a reliable platform to play off of.

Here’s a good example;

We’re looking for a bit of space to play but our shape and variation off #9 aren’t enough to trouble Leinster’s defence and they’re just chopping down our runners. In the end, we have to kick away and you can see what happened when we did that in this instance in the GIF above this one.

Leinster, on the other hand, were winning these setup collisions and giving their halfbacks space to play.

We soak up their release carries quite well here but when the ball comes back into the middle of the field, we’re really struggling to get dominant stops on Leinster’s power carriers like Doris and Porter.

Leinster’s try came from a poor defensive read off a maul break but the important part of this sequence came a few minutes prior.

Was it the 5m lineout that we just about won and then box kicked to the 22m line that Leinster ultimately scored from? No. Was it Ross Byrne’s kick? No.

For me, it was this moment.

We had handled Leinster’s phases pretty well up to this point but this was a key part of the play. Toner and O’Connor hitting up a pod in midfield. Wycherley is standing on Connors’ line, Holland is on Toner. Once this ball comes out of Byrne’s hands, there is a key defensive collision that we have to win.

Let’s see what happens.

Toner gets a big gain line win and that creates a quick ball pocket for Byrne to play into. This lost collision was crucial because it was a defensive fold point for our forwards. When Toner goes forward here, it means our forward reload has to go around the lost gainline and that gives Byrne a pocket to play into.

Sure, Byrne gets a nice bounce on this kick but he has 10m of space and time to play into. When you lose a key collision like this, you’re immediately under pressure on the next phase. You could argue that the angle for this collision was caused by some poor breakdown decision making on the previous phase but I can understand Archer’s thought process.

O’Donnell is a little hesitant with his “A” positioning and that plays into the next phase. O’Byrne has to hold his position relative to O’Donnell but I think we’ve gone too narrow here.

Leinster have really good options off this ruck but we’re overstacking on the inside option to Doris.

It’s a small moment, but that little hesitation from O’Donnell helped to compress our defence in and give Leinster an angle to hit. It’s a small thing but it snowballs to big things.

From there, we started the sequence that lead to Leinster with a lineout on the Munster 22. The width that Leinster get off that break confuses our #10/#12 defence and that leaves Arnold with a tough decision to make.

He steps in on O’Brien and drops off Byrne coming around on the loop. Byrne offloads to Lowe and Leinster are away to the try line, where they’d finish off the close-range opportunity a few phases later. Arnold will argue that Hanrahan and Scannell should have shifted out with Leinster’s width and that he was concerned about Scannell getting overloaded by O’Brien.

Either way, we were worried about those isolated midfield collisions where Leinster were bigger than us player-on-player. That was consistent throughout, and not just in midfield.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.

Archer and Cloete carry into Porter but we (a) get stopped behind the gain line and (b) can’t shift Porter off the ball quickly enough. No gainline, slow ball – big problems.

That wasn’t just on tight carries like this, it was off lineout and scrum too.

Arnold gets stopped on the gainline here and Haley has to come back around the corner, infringing right in front of Frank Murphy. Haley’s action was careless here but when you lose the gain line like this off a lineout, you put your cleaners under massive pressure to support your position.

We didn’t lose every collision, don’t get me wrong, just a lot of the important ones. Here’s an example;

We string two good carries together but the problem comes when we look to build back infield.

We get stopped up by Porter, lose momentum and then the pace of the ball coming around the corner gives Leinster plenty of chances over the ball. They took those chances again and again when we began to crank the pressure in their 22. We got a little “one-out” in these phases but I think our lack of carrying threat in the centres was a factor in that.

We found it very difficult to extend our attacking line in these attacking sequences and that made Leinster’s decision making in defence that little bit easier. We were compressed in attack, and Leinster could compress in defence as a result. When that happens, size matters and we were struggling to get the shape and structure we’d need to overcome that physical disadvantage. We finished the game without the ball carriers to hammer Leinster over from close range or the lineout solidity to build a consistent platform to play off.

The similarities to the Racing game with regards to the lineout pressure and our trouble in moving the ball up the field through the forwards were pretty striking. You can play with a physical disadvantage in phase play as long as you have a release option somewhere to allow you to extend your attack and play with the width and tempo that can negate that physical disadvantage. We didn’t have that release in this game.

It was a disappointing result made to look worse by the possession domination of the last 15 minutes. We were knocked back on the gainline a good few times and that never looks good, especially when the game finishes with a blown lineout. There were some good performances here but overall, there were too many below-average ones in key areas.

I think we’re better than what we showed here but to really push on with the encouraging signs we’ve seen at times this season, we need to establish more ball-carrying threats outside of Kilcoyne, Stander, Kleyn and Farrell. With three of our primary carriers rotated out, we struggled to impose ourselves on the Leinster defensive line and that is something that we really need to rectify if we’re going to push on.

The Wally Ratings: Leinster (H)

The Wally Ratings explainer page is here.  

Players are rated based on their time on the pitch, if they were playing notably out of position, and on the overall curve of the team performance. DNP means the player did not feature and N/A means they weren’t on the pitch long enough to warrant a fair rating.

Names	Rating
Dave Kilcoyne	★★
Kevin O'Byrne	★★★
Stephen Archer	★★
Fineen Wycherley	★★★
Billy Holland	★★
Tommy O'Donnell	★★
Chris Cloete	★★
Jack O'Donoghue	★★★★
Nick McCarthy	★★
JJ Hanrahan	★★
Shane Daly	★★★
Rory Scannell	★★★
Sam Arnold	★★
Dan Goggin	★★★
Mike Haley	★★★
Diarmuid Barron	DNP
Jeremy Loughman	★★★
Keynan Knox	★★★
Darren O'Shea	★★
Jack O'Sullivan	★★★★
Neil Cronin	★
Joey Carbery	★★★
Calvin Nash	DNP

Notable Players

I felt we had a poor enough showing from our primary half-backs. Nick McCarthy’s box-kick set up was incredibly slow, which is OK when you’re winding down the clock in tough wind conditions, but none of his box kicks had a positive result in a difficult first half.

I felt that JJ Hanrahan could have taken a little bit of the heat off him in that facet of the game – it might have been easier to get the low trajectory needed in the wind from 10 – but he was a little inaccurate in a few key moments and that hurt us.

I felt that Neil Cronin had a very poor outing in his cameo that was well below what I’d call his average. He made a few key turnovers in decent attacking positions and got lost in a few offensive rucks. This, for example;

The ruck was won cleanly by O’Sullivan and we needed our scrumhalf getting on the ball, not waiting for our second row to move the ball away. If you’re going to lean in on a ruck, don’t present the side of your body to a big back row forward because that’s the easiest way to get shifted off the position. I’ve seen Cronin play way, way better than this.

I couldn’t fault Tommy O’Donnell or Billy Holland from a work rate perspective but they lost too many defensive collisions for me. It’s not about tackles made or missed, it’s about how many times you got dominant stops on in defence and I felt both guys fell below what I’d expect from them here. Both guys had big numbers but when you go deeper into those numbers, you see very few dominant stops or effective platform carries.

Chris Cloete won a good breakdown penalty, was a little unlucky not to win another and gave away a really cheap penalty that put us under a bit of pressure.

I felt that Kilcoyne and Archer were below their best and struggled to impose themselves on the game. Keynan Knox had a prominent 25-minute cameo that hinted at the top player that he might yet become.

Fineen Wycherley had a mixed game – a slow enough lineout launch, for example – but put himself around well in possession. Decent.

Our midfield had a very mixed bag, for me. Rory Scannell had some good kicks but, along with Sam Arnold, wasn’t able to impose himself with the ball in hand. The game kind of passed both players by. They had very few creative interactions with the ball and, like a few others, lost too many offensive and defensive collisions for me.

Jack O’Sullivan came off the bench and added real value.

He carried with some real oomph and won a crucial turnover in the dying minutes that we really should have done more with. A really encouraging display. ★★★★

Jack O’Donoghue had another prominent game here that was a bit of a kick on from last week. He was a constant maul threat, a good lineout option on both sides of the ball and did a fair bit more with ball-in-hand. He’s certainly earned a start in the back row for Paris in January, where he’ll be tested again, but he was one of the starting forwards to make a real difference here. ★★★★