[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]W[/su_dropcap]hy not us? Because, ultimately, we fell short in the ways we always have to the team that has ended our season for the third year in a row. It hurts. It should. I think it hurts so badly this time because we were within a score of Leinster for most of the game but still couldn’t get the momentum we needed to stress Leinster when it counted.
It’s tough to take because Leinster were there to be beaten. We handled their attacking phase play relatively comfortably and their crucial try came from a critical handling error in the backfield and then a narrow enough call on a double movement after a collapsed maul by Rónan Kelleher. This is the worst I’ve seen Leinster play in months and yet we still couldn’t land a meaningful punch on them. That will rankle the longest.
Before the game, I wrote about the three key areas that I felt Munster needed to attack to compete effectively. Our attempts at hijacking Leinster’s lineout went relatively well in that it wasn’t a massive attacking platform for them but it was far from liability either. Our own lineout needed to be better than it was, to be honest, and there’s an entire article alone in that.
The other area where I felt Munster could compete was in the dreaded kicking game.
First, why would Munster look to box kick in this game? I’ll draw your attention to this sequence of play in the first half. Pay attention to the number of times you see Leinster sending a jackal after our breakdown.
They aren’t competing at the breakdown, which was pretty consistent throughout the game. It’s not that they never went after a poach – they did, on occasion – but their first instinct was to make the hit and file back into the defensive line while the secondary defenders cycled around the ruck. What does this mean? It means that Munster are losing offensive numbers on every ruck while Leinster are fanning out across the field because they know they have a size and stopping advantage against our ball carrying rotations. Their selection in the back row – Connors over Van Der Flier – was built around this principle.
Shouldn’t Munster just start playing the ball wider? No. It doesn’t work that way against modern elite defences. You have to buy a compression somewhere so that you have space to attack somewhere else. If you aren’t compressing Leinster off the ruck, then you’re going to run into trouble out wide. With no Kleyn, no Kilcoyne and no Snyman, we were up against it from the jump from a ball-carrying and collision-winning perspective and Leinster played like they knew this intimately.
So, when you’re fighting against a physical disadvantage – what do you do? We chose to kick. And it was relatively successful, believe it or not. We kicked to create four core scenarios. The first one was to kick and then win or pressure the receiver so we win the ball back. This is such an obvious strategy that I feel we don’t need to go into the details on it but this chase by Daly is worth a look as an example of a positive outcome to a box kick.
That’s a 25m gain. We didn’t have enough of that. Let’s have a look at the other three
1: The Open Jackal Threat
We used Murray’s box kick and our pincer kick-chase – Conway and Hanrahan in this instance – to contest the Leinster receiver, be it in the air or post receipt. I think we also wanted to show the referee the wall that Leinster were building ahead of their receiver but Andrew Brace only ever warned Leinster about it and never penalised them.
What this did create was a completely open ruck after the catch that CJ Stander could amble up to and win a breakdown penalty on. We landed the penalty to go 3-0 up and we used this kicking strategy – kick to contest and attack the ruck – a few more times with limited success.
We also used this to move Leinster up the field from our own Q2 to stress their recycle, also to decent effect.
This steal came within three phases of a Munster box kick as Leinster progressed across the pitch in their own Q2. With Beirne and Stander in decent form over the ball, this was a good tactic to stress the Leinster offensive breakdown, which looked a little ropey again.
2: Kick To Generate Transition Opportunities
When Leinster are filling the field on defensive passages and you don’t have the ball carrying heft in the front five to compress them, the next kicking strategy to use is kicking to force a situation where the opponent resets after the receipt of the kick and then kicks the ball back to you. This forces the Leinster defence to move off structure and creates a natural transition event where their defence can be attacked.
On this example, we kicked to just outside the Leinster 22 and pressured Keenan well on landing.
This was a good kick because now Leinster have to kick back to us and not straight into touch. When they kick back to us – a poor kick by McGrath – we have a brief window where we can attack them on transition. Let’s look at what happened.
It all fell apart on receipt of the ball when Murray ran into a blind alley and the next available guy to play halfback after we recycled the ruck was Stephen Archer. Opportunity gone.
My focus here would be why we ran the ball back down the tramline when we had a transition chain building on the openside with Devin Toner in a vulnerable position? The two guys I’m interested in are Murray and Hanrahan.
When Murray takes this ball, Hanrahan is dead on the play for no real reason. Why did Hanrahan not reset outside Murray to link up the transition chain across the field? That’s what transition attack is – creating a wide passing chain that takes advantage of the fact that the defence is running into position from 10/20m away.
Instead, Hanrahan stays in place to half-screen for Murray before resetting to a first receiver position off the ruck that he knows Murray won’t be able to pass from because he’s carrying the ball into traffic. We luck out when Connors strays offside at the ruck but this was a transition window we just didn’t attack.
When you get these kickbacks from Leinster it’s an opportunity to stress their defence in a way that you would normally need a heavy ball-carrying rotation to produce. My issue was that we got a look at these brief windows of space to play some high-tempo stuff but we didn’t back ourselves.
Why crash this up when we’re two scores down coming into the last ten minutes? Why go hunting for blue shirts?
We didn’t use these opportunities half enough. We weren’t going to beat Leinster by playing it safe on transition.
***
Ultimately, the winning and losing of this game came down to a 10 minute stretch between the 55th and 65th minute.
The two missed kicks by Hanrahan played a large part in that and there’s no point in pretending they didn’t. These are kicks that Hanrahan would probably make in most other contexts.
Did the knock he’d shipped earlier in the game make it easier for him to push these two kicks off to the right? Maybe. But Hanrahan will wake that these were two makeable kicks for a player of his calibre off the tee and trying to argue that they weren’t crucial moments missed would be nonsense. They were big moments in the game that passed us by.
That we then doubled up on these kicks by conceding a sloppy penalty at the other end almost immediately – that Sexton landed to make it a two-score game at 13-3 with 15 minutes to play – only compounded those errors. JJ wasn’t alone in these mistakes, though. Far from it.
That’s just a selection of errors and slips from senior players and others. Jack O’Donoghue’s penalty for not releasing was below the level of a player of his ability. Earls work in the backfield on a good kick by Sexton was below the level of what we know he can produce. Murray’s poor pass to De Allende gave Sexton a half a second head start to stand him up off a good maul break and his pass to Holland on that hit up line was hitting his inside shoulder – not good enough. Loughman’s handling error at the base of the ruck after a stolen Leinster lineout was beyond average.
Why did we lose? Why not us? Because Leinster weren’t making these errors at crucial times and we were. We approached this game with a tactical kicking plan that worked.
Our second box kick lead to a penalty to make it 3-0.
Our third box kick lead a kick receipt that should have been a Munster penalty for Larmour holding JJ in at the ruck but poor Andrew Brace blew a decision he was literally looking at.
Our fourth box kick lead to a good kick competition and earned a kick transition opportunity when Leinster kicked it back.
Our fifth box kick pressured the Leinster receipt, earned a kick back and Munster won a penalty from the first collision off the kick receipt.
Our sixth box kick saw Conway winning the ball back in the air.
Our seventh box kick could have been a penalty to Munster after Kelleher changed his line to block Andrew Conway.
Our eight box kick could have been a Munster penalty at the breakdown for (a) not releasing on Will Connors (b) a neck roll on Beirne by Toner or (c) Peter O’Mahony stealing the ball. Andrew Brace awarded a Leinster penalty instead, telling O’Mahony that “you’re the second man in and the ball wasn’t out” but there was no Leinster player on their feet so there was no ruck.
And I could go on.
Box kicking wasn’t the problem. Our inability to build sustained pressure on Leinster once the scenarios we wanted to generate from our box kicking was the problem.
Missed penalties. Uncharacteristic blown lineouts in key areas after hard-won penalties. They all added up.
This is a side effect of playing small ball at the lineout, something we had little choice in given the injuries to Snyman and Kleyn.
When we won lineouts and generated positive momentum, we fell into old failings. At this stage, I think we know that Leinster do not rate Rory Scannell’s ability to flash a wide pass or win a collision on this kind of pullback play off a maul break so when it ends with our attack looking constricted and narrow, neither side look all that surprised.
When we generated momentum on phase play late in the game we needed people to play but instead, we were crashing the ball up.
Let’s have a crack at standing up Ross Byrne and Henshaw to get De Allende and O’Mahony a look at isolating O’Loughlin on the edge with Daly lurking. Instead, we’re lucky not to give away a penalty for crossing. What are we missing here?
When we’re playing with a size disadvantage, we need to take these brief windows of opportunity to stress Leinster. We couldn’t do it through our pack – 37 carries generated 17m of ground – and we couldn’t take our opportunities to play when they appeared.
Ultimately, old failings were exposed once again. All the talk of “what is Larkham here for if we’re box kicking ” from couch pundits and sloppy meme pages don’t get that the real problem is in our pack, and our tight five specifically. Our tight five didn’t have the punch to stress Leinster during phase play so we tried to play around it aerially. We did that well but then we didn’t have the beef or the All the nonsense you’ll read about box kicking misses this key point. It wasn’t the box kicking, it’s what came after. We were too small in the front five during phase play and Stander was our only back-row with the kind of electricity with the ball in hand that we needed to stress Leinster. Our plan relied on playing on transition, kicking to compete and getting greater purchase on the Leinster lineout than we managed. Throw in a few key errors and vital penalty misses and that’s the long and the short of it.
So what next? Three weeks of prep and then a new season. It’s a blessing, really. It means that we can’t spend too long dwelling on this result and performance. The talk of a loss here being a disaster before the game was well wide of the mark but it begs the question if this should be considered a high watermark for certain areas of our depth chart? We were missing four key starters that would have brought us closer but I’m at the point now where I’m looking at our back-row outside of Stander and wondering if a change is necessary. I’m looking at an urgent need to try out new options in the second row. We need to see what else we have at #10 and on the wing. Guys like Casey and Daly are the real deal, so you have to ask what other real deals are ready to break out ahead of a long list of good players and good characters who have taken us to semi-finals domestically and Europe and no further, for the most part?
This year was particularly frustrating because every decision we had to make had a catch-22 attached to it. We lost two key unit coaches late in 2018/19. We hired two good new coaches but they didn’t arrive until halfway through pre-season and two weeks before our first Champions Cup game. Our nightmarish Champions Cup pool meant we had to come in cold with half a gameplan with our returning World Cup internationals only to fall short again. When we rested and rotated with younger players in between three must-win games against Racing 92 and Saracens, we lost to a full-strength Edinburgh side that we would go onto finish second behind in the conference. By the time we were finished with Europe, key development time for younger options was lost because of the Six Nations and then the lockdown. We lost our starting lock pairing for the medium term in the first game of the restart in the same week that the guy we signed to be our key man at outhalf was announced as being out “indefinitely”.
We needed cohesion in this restart but whatever we managed to pull together wasn’t enough to fix the issues that Snyman was signed to help fix.
The good news is that we have a long season ahead before we come back to a potential knockout game against this Leinster side. There are key areas in the front row, second row, back-row, flyhalf and in the back three where we need to find new options but I truly believe that the answers to those questions are already in the HPC.
This loss hurts. There is nothing to say that next year will be our year because there is no logical progression from knocking on the door to smashing through it. We do not have a divine right to win trophies. This restart showed improvements but for now at least, we are a semi-final level team and that’s it. The power to change that perception is within our grasp but perhaps it’s time for new options to make that jump.
Only time will tell.
The Wally Ratings: Leinster (A)
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 |
|---|---|
| Jeremy Loughman | ★ |
| Niall Scannell | ★★ |
| Stephen Archer | ★★ |
| Tadhg Beirne | ★★ |
| Billy Holland | ★★ |
| Peter O'Mahony | ★ |
| Jack O'Donoghue | ★ |
| CJ Stander | ★★ |
| Conor Murray | ★ |
| JJ Hanrahan | ★ |
| Keith Earls | ★ |
| Damian De Allende | ★★ |
| Chris Farrell | ★★ |
| Andrew Conway | ★★ |
| Shane Daly | ★★★ |
| Kevin O'Byrne | N/A |
| James Cronin | ★★★ |
| John Ryan | ★★★ |
| Gavin Coombes | N/A |
| Chris Cloete | ★★★ |
| Craig Casey | N/A |
| Rory Scannell | ★ |
| Fineen Wycherley | ★★★ |
Notable Players
This was pretty poor stuff. I thought Beirne and Stander did OK for us on a bad day for our starting pack. This was as bad as I’ve seen Billy Holland, Peter O’Mahony and Jack O’Donoghue play in some time. The game just completely bypassed them and they struggled to make any kind of positive impact. All three were decisively outplayed by their opposite numbers during a big knockout game.
Rory Scannell had a poor game for me when he came on. I want to see a player that uses his passing range and kicking ability to open up the game as it broke up in the second half but he just looked for contact and lost the collision almost every time.
For me, the starting halfbacks were decisively disappointing in this game. Forget about the box kicking – it largely worked and was well executed – it’s the inaccuracy and failure to play when we had the opportunity that most disappointed me. Conor Murray’s passing wasn’t what it needed to be. I felt he was hitting a lot of inside shoulders, throwing fat balls and hitching his passing action on maul breaks way too much.
I marked JJ Hanrahan down because of his two missed kicks – it’s harsh but this is a knock out rugby game and when the game is decided by ten points, two missed penalties when we were seven points down were crucial. That’s the gift and the curse of goal kicking and it’s a bloodsport at the best of times. Make the kicks and you’re the hero, miss and the heat is on. It’s the game they play and it comes with the territory.
But that isn’t why I marked him with one star. He missed kicks, yes, but I felt he missed a number of opportunities during the game to stamp his authority on the game and they passed him by. This moment summed up a lot of it, for me. Here’s an opportunity to drive that ball low along the ground at an angle to stress Larmour in the backfield. Make him fumble. Get the ball skidding and hopping along the ground. Force a defensive lineout. Or angle it right behind Keenan so Daly and Earls can regather it.
This is neither. It’s a half measure. This is just one example of a game where he seemed in two minds for much of the contest. This poor pass to Holland is compounded by Hanrahan kicking the ball straight to Lowe with no backline chasers and Jeremy Loughman defending the edge.
What do you do here? I think you’ve got to hang onto the ball and run towards red shirts to recycle and go again. I truly believe that JJ is a lot better than what we saw here but it’s an inevitability that this game gets added to the missed drop goal against Racing 92 as evidence of a point that I’m not sure is correct – that Hanrahan isn’t up to it as a top-level flyhalf. I don’t think that’s true.
Other than this game and that moment against Racing, Hanrahan has had a really good season but a big-time 10 is judged on how they handle clutch moments in big games or how they react to falling short in those moments. The latter is where JJ is today but the opportunities for the young #10s behind him are clear to see.
Shane Daly was the one exception for me on the starting XV. He was faultless under the high ball and showed the kind of initiative in the second half that looked like it could drag us back into the game.
Whatever Munster look like going forward, I think Shane Daly has to be starting in the back three on the evidence of this game and the three since the restart.
I truly believe that we’re much better than we showed here and that our four key injuries (three to the starting pack and one at 10) limited the scope of what was possible at this stage of our evolution under Larkham. Whatever happens, we have to see more of what our young bucks can do to help us build to the playoffs of next season. There will be disruption but we have the talent – I think it’s time to let them off the leash.
