[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]N[/su_dropcap]o one back-five forward can do everything you need to a high standard in a first-class game. Essentially, no one back five forward will be – or should be, in my opinion – for example, your tighthead lock, your top ball carrier, your top tackler and your primary lineout jumper. My reason behind this is that every player only has so many calories to expend in a game if they are to be an 80-minute player and the more roles they spread those calories across, the less effective they become in all of those roles.

There’s always an isolated exception to the rule but, for the most part, there will be a natural segmentation of roles during a game.

Most players will pick two or three of the main jobs that the back five forwards are expected to produce and focus their energy on those roles to maximise their output.

• Ball carrying
• Offensive breakdown
• Defensive breakdown.
• Centre-field defence
• Wide space coverage
• Offensive and defensive lineout
• Offensive and defensive maul
• Scrummaging load

This is why it would be rare enough to see a player being a team’s top ball carrier, top lineout target, top tackler and biggest defensive/offensive breakdown guy while also being a second-row scrummager or heavy maul component. Well, unless you’re someone like Alun Wyn Jones, who’s role with Wales is so all-encompassing over the last two seasons it’s almost becoming a liability for them but I would suggest he’s the kind of outlier I was talking about back there in the first paragraph. As an addendum, I would also argue that Jones currently carrying load for Wales is one of the factors that have been driving the standard of his performances down over the last calendar year.

When you are missing multiple key components from your back five, that need to segment the roles becomes more difficult because as you dig deep into your squad to replace role specialists, you might not get full role coverage.

That’s why I felt that Clermont would have issues at the lineout that Munster could look to exploit in my Red Eye article ahead of the Miracle in the Stade Marcel Michelin two weekends ago.

Shorn of key lineout jumpers and low-gear, heavy pushing second rows – those tighthead locks everyone was scoffing at back in September 2019 – Clermont would face an incremental disadvantage at the set-piece that would only get worse as the game progressed.

Let’s look at their starting and replacement back five for this game and assign some role sets to them based on what I know of their game;

4. Paul Jedrasiak – tighthead lock and primary jumper
5. Peceli Yato Senibitu – impact ball carrier and tertiary jumper
6. Judicael Cancoriet – balanced work rate flanker and tertiary jumper
7. Clement Lanen – inexperienced 4/6D hybrid and primary jumper 
8. Fritz Lee – impact ball carrier and tertiary jumper

19. Thibault Lanen – inexperienced loosehead lock and primary jumper 
20. Edward Annandale – hugely inexperienced loosehead lock and primary jumper

If you’re the Clermont head coach, Franck Azéma, there’s no way that the loss of Sitaleki Timani and Sébastien Vahaamahina before the game didn’t have a massive effect on your pack’s role blend. Sure, every club runs with the “next guy off the line” philosophy when you’ve got a run of injuries but there’s no way that losing key physical components like Timani and Vahaamahina doesn’t mean;

• Exposing players like Yato to roles they are unsuited to (primary maul defence, intensive second-row scrummaging, etc)
• Limiting your remaining role specialists (like Jedrasiak) to primarily offensive set-piece activity or blend on-ball offensive and defensive work with defensive set-piece responsibilities
• Spreading different set-piece responsibilities around the pack.  

For Clermont, they seemed to give Jedrasiak a lot of on-ball responsibilities – he was a primary ball carrier and one of their top tacklers – but he only took one offensive lineout and stayed on the field for 78 minutes as tighthead lock. The majority of the offensive lineout output was to their back row with Clement Lanen taking four and Judicael Cancoriet taking two.

This is where your analysis and in-game tracking of the opposition’s behaviour is important when it comes to choking their lineout. What happens when you choke a lineout? This is when you limit the range of the opposition’s lineout to the front half of the lineout – which in turn limits their attacking options directly off the lineout – or force them to hit secondary or tertiary jumping targets in heavily contested areas.

For Munster, there were two live primary targets that they would have assessed pre-game – Jedrasiak and Lanen – with Cancoriet as a secondary jumper and Yato/Lee as tertiary jumping options.

On Clermont’s first lineout – thrown to the tail to Cancoriet – you can see O’Mahony, Munster’s most potent counter-jumper patrolling the middle space. The green space at the tail – the best place to launch off if you’re trying to attack wide – would be highly valued by Clermont in this instance because Munster were defending with 14 men after Shane Daly’s yellow card. Any ball Clermont would get to the middle or tail would give their midfield and wider attack a numbers advantage or a space advantage.

So Munster would be able to work out the following;

• Clermont value the back of the middle and tail of the lineout in this instance.
• Lanen and Jedrasiak are their primary jumpers
• Assess and eliminate the primary jumper rotation for your counter-launch action.

On this particular lineout, Munster left CJ Stander in the midfield covering JJ Hanrahan’s inside shoulder across from Fritz Lee so this was a six-man lineout.

O’Mahony and Beirne were guarding the two main launch areas and had eyes on Clermont’s two primary jumping threats, who were stacked in the middle of the lineout.

But Munster won’t be able to put two pods into the air – Kleyn is the hinge man that will, in theory, turn and lift left or right depending on what we see from Clermont but he can’t lift Beirne and O’Mahony, he will have to assist one of them or neither of them.

Let’s look at the play.

Clermont hit Cancoriet at the tail and spread the ball wide for an isolation play on Haley on the backfield. When we look at the lineout, you can see O’Mahony dismiss Lanen (yellow scrum cap) forward movement as a decoy and then make a peripheral vision decision that Jedrasiak is the target in the middle space to be lifted by Yato.

O’Mahony goes up in the middle, lifted by Coombes but Kleyn has seen that Jedrasiak has jumped out of the line and turns to lift Beirne to counter. We’re a little too clustered at the tail – Beirne has stepped in after O’Mahony’s launch – and Cancoriet gets an uncontested take at the tail for a good gain.

On the next lineout, Munster had the same kind of coverage with O’Mahony and Beirne contesting the middle and tail respectively. Kleyn, again, is at the hinge position between both our primary counter-jumpers.

Kleyn’s backlift on O’Mahony is the quicker counter-launch. He can, as before, move across the space to lift Beirne but that’s the slower option because you’ve got to take two steps and then explode into the lift.

If we look at how it plays out, you can see Stander realising he can come into the lineout and fill the space that Jedrasiak ultimately jumps into.

Was this a remedied mistake? Hard to know, really. I think if Stander is in the spot between Beirne and Kleyn, we’d get a pretty strong counter on this throw. Even with the slower lift, we got a pretty decent counter-launch on this “flinch” lift by Clermont. Jedrasiak walked into and launched in the only space that Munster left open. That, all on its own, tells a story.

ASM’s third lineout was taken by Lanen again and lead directly to the fourth try straight from the maul. Munster did not contest the throw but even on that lineout, Clermont threw the ball to the front and rolled the maul infield after a brief diagonal shove in a way that Munster will be desperately disappointed they didn’t stop.

This maul was far from “unstoppable” and I think we overcommitted on the initial touchline diagonal in a way that probably reflects how badly we started this game.

Even then, Clermont needed to throw this one straight to the front which is another clue on what was to come.

Their next lineout came late in the first half after Munster had brought the score back to 28-16. It’s still a comfortable scoreline for Clermont but their scheme on this lineout suggested that they were already beginning to manage the load of Jedrasiak.

The spacing on this lineout would suggest a throw to the middle space with either Jedrasiak going into the air while being lifted by Cancoriet and Lanen, or Lanen going into the air stepping backwards, lifted by Yano and Jedrasiak.

Watch the action as O’Mahony files back into the space to guard Jedrasiak.

That seems like a call adjustment, to me. Yano goes into the air at the front uncontested – pretty unconvincingly too, I might add – but ASM are immediately running their midfield play under heavy defensive pressure and the lineout comes to nothing.

At this point in the game, Munster had already started to exert real pressure on Clermont in the tight exchanges and you could already see the strain showing on Pecili Yato, who was becoming less and less effective as the game wore on.

This tired-looking Clermont maul right before halftime was a good illustration of where Clermont were, physically.

Clement Lanen was the target again. They earned a penalty off a Munster high tackle a few phases later and ran a gimmick play at the next lineout that Munster comfortably dealt with to see out the half.

At half time, Munster were able to read what they’d seen to that point – one ball to Cancoriet, one to Yano, one to Jedrasiak and the rest to Clement Lanen.

In the second half, Munster put O’Mahony directly on Clement Lanen and heavily contested every Clermont throw. When Clermont went to an alternate jumper to shake off O’Mahony (Jedrasiak or Clement’s brother Thibault off the bench) Beirne was all over them forcing clean steals crooked throws.

The key maul turnover right at the end was the second ball thrown to Cancoriet and, by that stage, Clermont had no appetite for the tight exchanges and they rolled right across the face of Munster’s defensive maul before breaking right into CJ Stander for a choke turnover.

By the end, Clermont had nowhere to go at the set-piece and conceded ground at almost every penalty. Their role set up had fallen apart with Jedrasiak all but burned out as their sole “tight” forward in the back five with any size or experience.

Improper role sets mean tired players, tired players concede penalties, conceding penalties lose you games.

Munster’s scoreboard pressure was the biggest factor but do not write off the impact that Munster’s defensive lineout and analysis had on the game as it developed towards the end game.