[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]I[/su_dropcap]n the previous article, I spoke about where I felt Munster needed to improve and one area – territorial defence – where I felt the addition of Damien De Allende, in particular, would be a key addition to the Category 1 matchday squad.

That leaves four other key areas that I feel Munster will need to address in the coming season to go where we are now and have been, to where we want to be – winning trophies.

Much of what we have been doing this season before the lock-in will be relevant in the season’s to come but my basic concept of “teams do not sign big players for no reason” can be applied to a few areas where I feel we’ve fallen down over the past three seasons.

In the previous article, I covered the defensive edge and how the addition of Damien De Allende is a clear attempt to improve our defensive edge pressure, give us a potent weapon off the set-piece and give us an extra ball-carrying option on settled phase play, at a bare minimum. I think De Allende will improve a lot of the small areas too, such as upping the quality of our screen assists and compressing the opposition’s edge defence in ways that can create more workable space for our back three on certain attacking plays, for example.

For me, though, the signing of RG Snyman is the key piece of recruitment for this side.

If Munster are to progress I think we have to play big – there’s the title of the article in the dialogue for those keeping track – and RG Snyman gives us that option for the most important games.

What do I mean by playing big? It means selecting a team with the size and variety required to hit the key points where I feel Munster will have to hit to get past the roadblocks we’ve faced against Racing, Leinster and Saracens.

All of these elements are ultimately linked together in the tapestry of the overall performance but we’ll focus on these two particular elements of “big” play in this article.

1. Have the lineout variety to launch your strike plays with the players to commit the opposition to a certain position.
2. Have the defensive strength in the middle of the field to deny the opposition dominant centre-field position and limit the scope of their options on settled phase play as a result.

I’ll cover the lineout in the next article but centre-field defensive strength is detailed enough as it is.

Centre Field Position

My conversation with Jonny Holland this past week featured a really good segment on the nature of where you concede ground in defence.

In essence, when it comes to attack there are easy metres to be won in the wider channels that, while technically advancing you over the gainline, are “fool’s gold” with regards to your overall position unless you can enter into the opposition’s 22 on the wide break or score a try directly.

By slinging the ball wide-wide with any bit of accuracy off a wider ruck, you might well get around the main defensive press initially, only to be snagged by the edge defenders.

When you come back across the field after the resulting ruck, the defensive line has the entire width of the field to blitz on so, if they are strong up the middle of the field on the next phase, they will push the line of your attack backwards.

Why is this a problem if you want to get centre-field ruck position? Because centre-field ruck position earned on a negative gain line means that most of your attacking assets have to reset backwards, while the opposition just advance forward to the new offside line.

Look at the progression from the first ruck possession (R1 and yellow) to the second ruck possession (R2 and blue).

You can see it more plainly if we overlay the defensive progression on this ruck pattern. The red block indicates the R1 defensive position and the pink boxes represent the R2 defensive position.

Remember, the defensive action you see here is basically running forward (with the centre field defenders making the impact) while the offensive players have to turn back and run to a position where they can be of use on the new advantage line or shuttle backwards in a hurry.

This means a new call relevant to the new offensive picture, a hasty reorganisation of pods going backwards and an attack under pressure trying to resource R2 before the opponent can shove you off the ruck or jackal the ball.

A big centre-field defence limits the ground you concede in central positions and it’s a vital part of winning top end games. The stronger your centre field defence is – and this is ruck position-specific when it comes to deciding what the “centre” is – the harder it will be for the opposition to generate the kind of attacking positions that lead to dangerous linebreaks.

From a defensive perspective, we need to forget about numbers like made tackles and missed tackles when it comes to assessing defending centre-field position. This doesn’t tell us what we want to know.

To properly visualise what effective centre-field defence is, we have to visualise the difference between the molecules in ice, water and steam.

Ice is what we want – a rigid structure with little movement between the molecules (defenders). They are bound together with hardly any movement. We can deal with water as long we can get those molecules frozen up again. What we don’t want is steam – tonnes of oscillating molecules moving all over the place.

If your defensive line doesn’t ice the opposition’s centre-field carrying on successive phases, your defensive line turns to steam.

See what happens the Racing defensive line when Kilcoyne gets beyond the first defender.

It puts the primary line into motion, which makes the next carry easier to hit and Racing only managed to regain some integrity with the stop on Scannell. I’d like to see what a Damien De Allende could do on a similar release phase but you can see the principle. The initial carry got the defensive line oscillating, and that made subsequent carries harder to defend because the individual elements of the defensive line had to move around to react.

When we look at Munster’s work during the middle block of the 2019/20 season, we see this kind of “oscillation” being a consistent problem against the bigger teams.

When Vakatawa hits the defensive line it produces a lot of movement in and around the contact point.

If we slow it down, you can see the molecules of the defensive line come unglued in the aftermath and create conditions for Russell to exploit. Look at how the carry dislodges players that aren’t even involved in the tackle.

The break – off a quick tap penalty – had the same effect as a big carry right before this and exaggerated the effect of Vakatawa’s carry on the line.

With physically bigger and stronger defenders, you can effectively defend more central space. That’s why, with defence against physically bigger sides in mind, my Munster selection right now looks like this;

The pack is the bit that I want to focus on here as I feel everything outside that is relatively obvious – although I will elaborate on the backline selection in later articles – but I felt the selection on the flanks is important.

I’ve gone for size, here. I’ll speak about the attack in a later article but if we focus on the defensive side of the ball, this is a solid primary defensive line.

I think moving Carbery out of primary defensive traffic is an inevitability at this point and, depending on rule changes but not entirely dependent on them, I think we’ll go with a rough 11-2-2 set up in defence with the size and impact of our primary line – along with three huge jackal threats near the edges – giving us a lot of stopping power in central areas.

Our centre-field is packed with impact stoppers and big physical units. Snyman is a key part of this proposed solidity. He has the size, weight and strength to cover a lot of lateral space in central spaces and free up Kleyn/Stander/Kilcoyne for alternate stops.

The bigger we can go in the middle, the less the edges will hurt us against bigger teams.

In reality, with Kleyn, Snyman and Beirne acting as a half-lock, we have the size to compete with anyone.