[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]M[/su_dropcap]unster managed this game excellently for 77 minutes. We handled Connacht’s kicking game excellently, pinned them in place with our own kicking game and pieced them up in contact while generating enough opportunities on limited possession to have a comfortable 13 point lead with three minutes to go.
Skip forward nine minutes and Munster are down to 13 men defending a scrum on our 5m line with seven forwards packed down and CJ Stander defending the blindside wing. All Connacht had to do was put it through the hands, you’d feel, and a try to generate a kick to win the game would have been inevitable. Instead, Paul Boyle broke off the back of the scrum, the play settled into a close-range slugfest where Connacht’s number advantage was less effective. Beirne forced a knock-on with some outstanding tight defence and that was that.
If Connacht had played this a little smarter, they’d have had probably won this game. That will be a bugbear for Munster despite ultimately coming away with a 4-1 that puts two clear bonus point wins and change between ourselves and our neighbours up the road. The first 77 minutes were a picture of tactical control, kick management and physical dominance. The last 9 minutes are a picture of what happens when you let a ref into a game, when you roll the dice on iffy breakdown entries and when you use up a full game’s worth of bad luck in one ten minute block.
It’s almost like two different games. Look at the hinge moment in the game. Munster conceded a late try that, by the time we kicked off, left 40 seconds on the clock to be managed with 14 men. That’s a doable tactical equation. Connacht won’t want to kick the ball away because they need a score, you can keep 13 men in the primary line to pressure them and, with a bit of luck, the ball will die in their 22.
Healy kicked off deep – the right decision – and hemmed Connacht into their own 22. Now for the bad luck. Beirne was pinged for a high tackle on Carty that was only a high tackle because Carty slipped.
It’s a penalty, don’t get me wrong, because there is contact there but Beirne was always legal with his height and approach. If Carty’s left leg doesn’t slip, the level change that earned the penalty doesn’t happen. Bad luck. From there, the situation started to deteriorate. Munster couldn’t attempt any kind of breakdown counter-entries because, well, it was a high-risk play with this referee as the game progressed. So we had to focus on impact collisions and live with the quick ball we had to concede which, when you’re down to 14 men, is problematic.
This naturally lead to space on the flanks. Billy Holland saved the day on one flank with one of the best tackles I’ve seen him make in his career given the context of the moment and a one on one isolation between Dillane and Healy off the crossfield kick.
I think the margins between a Beirne jackal penalty and the eventual yellow card for McCarthy are pretty thin here but it lead to the endgame that, thankfully, Connacht managed to botch.
For the first 76 minutes, Munster managed Connacht incredibly well. Connacht’s win over Leinster – in particular their first half which won them the game – was based on smart territorial management through the use of kicking long to pressure. Munster used a different technique; Conor Murray’s box kick. When Murray is “on” in this aspect of the game, there’s nobody playing the game today that can touch him. This short sequence was a good illustration of what I mean.
Accuracy, length and a good chase consistently marched Connacht backwards and our handling on their kick returns cranked territorial pressure. This had the perfect ending with Dillane knocking on under pressure but it was pulled back for marginal contact in the air.
We were able to influence Connacht through the boot and stayed solid when Carty probed our backfield defence.
That, coupled with oppressive primary line defence and physical, hard-nosed work at the breakdown really limited Connacht’s options with ball-in-hand. Last week, Connacht won against Leinster with 40% possession so Munster made them play with the ball more, won more collisions and ultimately won the game with a 40% share of possession.
Pre-game, I was wondering how Munster would handle Carty’s attempts to keep us at range with their “kick to pressure” tactics and I think we managed it quite well, for the most part.
The dominance I expected at the scrum didn’t materialise, with Connacht coming out on top due to a rake of technical infringements to the point we rarely got clean launches on either put in. In the lineout, I thought Munster did quite well to limit the scope of Connacht’s lineout with some decent contests but Connacht could say the same with a few key disruptions from the impressive Quinn Roux.
On an unrelated note, remind me to never let this reffing crew help me put up shelving.
The biggest area of dominance for Munster in this game came at the maul, on both sides of the ball. We repeatedly brick-walled Connacht’s builds and had so much dominance on our own that I was half disappointed we weren’t able to take more advantage with some of our later penalty opportunities in the second half.
That first stop is something else – not an inch. The second was a picture of breaking the front of the maul to expose the “drive” to your counter-shove and destroying it. The last maul was an offensive example of our offensive dominance when we got any kind of solid build and it’s been a consistently good feature of our forward work this season.
That’s what makes the last nine minutes of this game so difficult.
Healy got badly caught by Arnold on this scrum break but I’m still a little confused on the penalty Murray conceded in attempting to recover the ball after the fumble here.
From there, Munster were able to recover the ball and exit down the field. We were left down by a few technical penalties, including this one after a clean turnover. Beirne can count himself a little unlucky here in that we should have reacted quicker to the turnover but you’d wonder if there was a side entry penalty against Dillane here, given he entered from outside the referee’s right shoulder.
Scannell’s yellow card a minute later was a turning point in the contest. I have no issue with the penalty itself – there needs to be more of a release – so I would instead look at the decision making in going after the poach here when we’ve seen some of the calls that were and were not made in the minutes building up to this moment.
Do we need a poach here? I would say no, given that there was no bonus point to shoot for and keeping Connacht outside seven points was the main aim but players want to make plays.
From there, we entered the chaotic end-game that we only just about managed to survive.
A win is a win though. We also showed some really nice attacking continuity and skill set during the game that we’ll have been disappointed not to exploit more fully.
This four points, our fifth away win of the season to date, has put us a win or two away from securing a final spot. Our next PRO14 game is scheduled to be Benetton away in late January – although we’ll see if we get the next two weekends free in the next 24 hours – so this win against our nearest competitor will be of massive value in the last few rounds.
Notable Players
This was a pretty good outing. Most of the pack racked up double figures in defence – even off the bench – and did really well on close-range defensive sets.
I thought Mike Haley had another incredibly solid outing under the highball and patrolling the deep spaces. At this stage, he has to be in contention for the Irish Six Nations squad because very few players offer the spacial awareness and high-quality aerial work that he does at this stage of the season.
Damian De Allende and Chris Farrell had two mighty games here. De Allende, in particular, was an absolute brute in defence and he looks every inch a World Cup winner with every minute he spends on the field.
Farrell had another strong outing on ball, took his try well and impacted well in defence.
I thought that both JJ Hanrahan and Ben Healy had imperfect games. This was JJ’s first outing since Clermont and, while he made his kicks at goal well, I felt he never really got the kind of game-running traction he’d have liked when we had spells on the ball. Healy exited really well but looked a little hesitant on a few of his running routes off the set-piece and won’t be happy with his one on one with Dillane in defence in the last few minutes.
CJ Stander had a really good, brutally tough day at the coal face for Munster. He showed off his skillset with ball in hand and was a nightmare over the ball.
Fineen Wycherley had a really strong, ultra-physical game off the bench and looks to be really accelerating his physical impact on both sides of the ball.
When Conor Murray plays like this, he makes the very difficult look incredibly easy, like he’s just casually flinging his boot at the ball and dropping it a few short metres from the touchline after scraping a satellite on the way down. He controlled where the game was played, for the most part, and managed the ruck really well. As I said on the Post Match Wallystream, don’t sleep on this guy just yet – he’s the kind of marquee player that clubs in France, England or Japan would be shouting about for months.
Tadhg Beirne won player of the match on the night and looked every inch the 80-minute, complete athlete that he has become. He can call the lineout, he can jump all through the line, he steals breakdown ball with so much style you’d think it was an Ocean’s 11 movie, he can hammer it in the tight exchanges with the best of them and, like here, he can win you the game right at the death. Beirne is back to his scary, game-altering best. ★★★★★
The Wally Ratings: Connacht (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 |
|---|---|
| James Cronin | ★★★ |
| Kevin O'Byrne | ★★★ |
| Stephen Archer | ★★★ |
| Jean Kleyn | N/A |
| Tadhg Beirne | ★★★★★ |
| Gavin Coombes | ★★★ |
| Peter O'Mahony | ★★★ |
| CJ Stander | ★★★★ |
| Conor Murray | ★★★★ |
| JJ Hanrahan | ★★★ |
| Shane Daly | ★★★ |
| Damian De Allende | ★★★★ |
| Chris Farrell | ★★★★ |
| Keith Earls | ★★★ |
| Mike Haley | ★★★★ |
| Niall Scannell | ★★★ |
| Josh Wycherley | ★★★ |
| Keynan Knox | ★★★ |
| Fineen Wycherley | ★★★★ |
| Billy Holland | ★★★ |
| Nick McCarthy | ★★★ |
| Ben Healy | ★★★ |
| Rory Scannell | N/A |
