You don’t need too much insight into Andy Friend’s Connacht to realise pretty quickly that this is a heavily rotated Connacht matchday 23. All you have to do is read Andy Friend’s own words on the matter earlier this week where he literally said “It’s all eyes on Munster now and what we’ve got to do. We are going to have a different XV and the performance that the first XV delivered has given the blokes who will play against Munster an incredible benchmark.” He was true to his word this Friday.
There’s no Bundee Aki. There’s no Jack Carty. There’s no Keiran Marmion. There’s no Dave Heffernan. There’s no Jarrod Butler. Instead, Andy Friend is having a look at the rest of his squad with 2020/21 in mind. Depending on where you look, this is supposedly evidence of an IRFU stitch up to ensure a Munster semi-final but that thinking seeks to deliberately avoid the reality of Connacht’s situation.
It seems pretty clear to me that Friend is using these two games (and this one in particular) as a barometer to see what his options are ahead of the new season in the absence of meaningful friendly contests as would be the norm in non-pandemic times. Connacht have nothing tangible to play for, bar their own squad aims and for selection consideration next season. They can’t qualify for the playoffs and their European seeding relies completely on whether or not the Champions Cup has 20 or 24 teams this year. 2019/20 is dead for Connacht and has been since the lockdown. So Andy Friend, rightly, is looking to the new season where he can launch this Connacht squad at the 2020/21 PRO14 with an eye on making hay while most of their opponents will be disrupted by international callups. Connacht will be with Aki for certain. Jack Carty, too, will probably be in Ireland camp and I think Friend may well find himself without Dillane, Heffernan and perhaps Keiran Marmion at different times. But that will likely be it.
And while everyone else tangles with multiple call-ups in key positions, Connacht will be able to stay relatively undisrupted and, with that lack of disruption, be in a position to make the kind of hay they would have been expected to make during the 2019 World Cup before a catastrophic series of injuries.
They won’t know what they have until the rubber hits the road, so to speak, so this selection seems to go some way to answering the questions Friend might have about a few positions and players.
Munster, on the other hand, have a PRO14 semi-final against Leinster to earn, first and foremost, and then prepare for.
There is no sequence of events that can lead to Munster topping the pool at this stage – thanks to that narrow loss against Edinburgh all the way back in late 2019 – but it is possible for Munster to drop out of the truncated playoffs altogether if Scarlets win and we lose to Connacht without a bonus point.
The levels of selection – Munster going full Cat 1 and Connacht rotating to a Cat 2/3 selection – would, naturally enough, heavily favour a Munster win in this game but that isn’t to say that Connacht are without threat. In Conor Oliver and Sam Arnold, they have two former Munster players with a lot of fresh motivation to perform in this contest and former League player Abraham Papaili’i has the size and explosivity to make a big impact on his debut.
Let’s have a look at the teams;
Connacht: 15: Tiernan O’Halloran; 14: Colm de Buitléar, 13: Sam Arnold, 12: Tom Daly, 11: Matt Healy; 10: Conor Fitzgerald, 9: Caolin Blade; 1. Paddy McAllister, 2: Shane Delahunt, 3: Dominic Robertson-McCoy, 4: Niall Murray, 5: Quinn Roux (c), 6: Eoghan Masterson, 7: Conor Oliver, 8: Abraham Papili’i
Replacements: 16: Jonny Murphy, 17: Conor Kenny, 18: Matthew Burke, 19: Ultan Dillane, 20: Seán Masterson, 21: Stephen Kerins, 22: Peter Robb, 23: Conor Dean
From a Munster perspective, this selection makes a tonne of sense.
Pre-armed with the knowledge that Friend was entirely rotating his XV, you could have forgiven Van Graan for resting a swathe of his key men after last weekend’s injury meteor strike.
But Munster can’t afford to keep their powder dry. We have a max of three games between today and the proposed PRO14 2020/21 season restart October 3rd with a PRO14 Grand Final the ultimate short term goal.
A win against Connacht will guarantee one more game for certain – a semi-final in the first weekend in September – and a win there will mean a final one week later. That’s it. That’s all there is, and the possibility of winning a trophy From October on, COVID allowing, Munster will have all the time in the world to bed in new talents like Healy, Hodnett, Flannery, Knox, Salanoa, Ahern, the Coombes cousins, Kelly, the younger Wycherley, Crowley and a rake of others. It’ll be a necessity, given the extended international window that is expected in November and then again in February. For now, there is only this weekend. A win brings us to another showdown with Leinster and then a win there earns us a game for a trophy. That’s the plan anyway.
So Van Graan and Larkham have selected accordingly.
This is more or less the same side that took on Leinster last week with a few injury tweaks and it seems to me that the keywords to take away from this team selection are cohesion and continuity. If Munster are to make a stab at improving on our two-point defeat last weekend into something that will win a semi-final, it will be with a cohesive, game-hardened unit. It’s worth remembering that this is still a side that is coming to grips with the complexities of the Stephen Larkham attacking game-plan and that can only fully be hammered home with on-field minutes against live opposition.
Microsoft Teams meetings, presentations, reading game-books and training sessions/games are fine, but it’s real games with real stakes that fully imprint the minutiae of the modern game-plan. It’s not as simple as saying “we’re running a ‘1-3-2-2’ lads and we want to play with a few offloads out of contact”. There are multiple calls, multiple shapes and structures and that’s before you even look at the set-piece. It takes time and cohesion to work at the elite level. Munster need to bake the lessons of last weekend into this week’s performance so that a potential semi-final against Leinster can be attacked with, hopefully, our best performance of the season.
So what does this mean for Connacht? Looking at their team selection, the one area that stands out to me is their openside defence off the set-piece. This relates directly to our twin titan midfield combination of Damian De Allende and Chris Farrell.
If you want an idea of the threat Damian De Allende poses in the #12 channel off the set-piece, you should have a look at this small few seconds from the game at the weekend. Keep an eye on De Allende’s positioning as the scrum hits and watch the reaction of the Leinster defence.
Leinster are so preoccupied with the threat that they leave a short-side one on one in the primary defence line between Conway and Lowe. McGrath, who’d normally be floating closer to the #8 on this play tracking the break from Murray with Van Der Flier going with him directly, is a good 2m away from the scrum when it breaks.
Sexton and Henshaw are drifting towards De Allende and Van Der Flier flies off the side of the scrum with all the urgency you’d expect. Munster can exploit the same principle against Connacht.
Connacht had a very different 10/12/13 combination against Ulster but their tendencies when facing a big midfield runner (Stuart McCloskey) were quite clear. This move off a pretty central scrum is focused on narrowing the openside defensive blitz – Hume running an inside line to stall Marmion and Butler – with the strike being Burns looping around a McCloskey carry with Stockdale holding the outside defender.
The key for Ulster here is getting the ball to McCloskey outside of Aki’s defensive route. For the scheme to work, Connacht have to be worried about McCloskey on Farrell moving at pace with Ulster playing off the back of the natural compression this brings.
This scrum play works on the same principle but Connacht’s defensive action in reaction to the McCloskey threat is what we’re interested in.
Let’s have a look at the pre-break setup. McCloskey is lined up in the #13 channel with Hume running a hold and drift line at #12.
The guiding principle here is moving the primary focus of the Connacht defence to the outside edge before looking to release Stockdale. Connacht get a good “L” shape once Carty and Marmion join the line and they are all set to push out on the primary physical threat – McCloskey. A strong L shape on lineout defence gives certainty to the outside defenders by stacking the inside.
Farrell and Aki are showing us who the main threat is – McCloskey. Hume drifts across the back of McCloskey’s line to hold the outside defenders so that Stockdale gets a one on one in space. This creates an excellent position for Ulster and big gain line win. If Ulster were able to secure this ruck better – Aki’s drag on McCloskey was important here – Cooney would have a massive opportunity on the short side.
It wasn’t to be. Cooney had to help secure the ruck and the opportunity evaporated.
Munster want to stress Fitzgerald, Daly and Arnold and prevent an easy “L” on lineout and scrum defence. Daly and Arnold aren’t weak defenders but Munster can manipulate the Connacht midfield in a way that Ulster wasn’t able to. Ulster often used McCloskey in the outside channel on the set-piece to drag Aki – Connacht’s strongest defender – up and across the field to create an easier angle of attack for McCloskey and an edge compression on Farrell.
Munster will use De Allende on the inside to make an L push out from Connacht more difficult. We want to stress Oliver, Blade and Fitzgerald off the scrum and maul breaks to isolate Daly in space and force Arnold into the early reads that consistently punished him while he was at Munster. Arnold gives up a lot of size to most midfield opponents but he’s always been most effective from a defensive perspective when he can get a head start on the contact.
This was a red card for a high tackle but it’s a good illustration of where Arnold is quite strong. He makes an early read on the play from McCloskey to Leali’ifano and accelerates into the contact.
He rides high on this one and deserved his red card but if he gets this kind of shot on Farrell or De Allende, he’s got the power to stop them. The key is to either (a) sit Arnold down and run over the top of him, (b) bring him into space to attack his lateral movement or (c) force him to overcompensate on the inside man and expose him on the outside shoulder. De Allende at #12 can produce that by isolating Daly and opening up Farrell (with Shane Daly outside) to get big gains on the edge off the scrum, lineout and maul breaks.
