[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]Y[/su_dropcap]ou could say that Munster’s hopes for the 2020/21 season took a mortal blow seven minutes into the very first game after the first restart and I don’t think it would be an exaggeration. When RG Snyman and Dave Kilcoyne hobbled off with season-ending and practically season-ending injuries respectively against Leinster back in September close on the heels of the announcement of Joey Carbery’s indefinite injury spell, it was clear that Munster would be facing into a new season with heightened expectations but without three core players for an extended period of time.

Injuries happen, sure, but for Munster to be without two key physical components – one of them a massive signing to address a long-standing issue in our pack composition – and the guy long identified as our #1 flyhalf and you can see how it might affect things. For comparison, imagine Leinster didn’t have Andrew Porter, played a season where Furlong was injured for most of it, Sexton only came back from a long-term injury a few weeks before a final after 18 months out and James Ryan was gone for the entire season.

Why bring Leinster into it? For the simple fact that it is Leinster who Munster are consistently compared. It has not been a kind comparison as of late. When Munster fail to beat Leinster across four games since August 2020 and with one of those losses coming in a final, there will be no escaping the criticism. It’s hard to get a read on the fixture in all honestly. When Munster kick well – August 2020 and January 2021 – we lost by two and three points respectively. When we kicked poorly – September 2020 and March 2021 – we lost by ten points.

The one constant in that equation has been Munster’s kicking, which has been a consistent critique of this team over the last few years and this season was no different, at least in the big games. The primary issue was kicking too much – we have the most kicks out of hand in the PRO14 – but when it came to our losses this season against Leinster, Ulster and Toulouse, our opponents kicked to us more than we kicked to them.

This principle was exhibited in stark relief during Leinster’s fantastic win against Exeter over in Sandy Park. Rob Baxter’s men had the size and power in the pack to really hurt Leinster’s defensive system (and they did so repeatedly) but they didn’t have the kicking game to dictate where the game was played. Instead, Leinster dictated that position to them through their long territorial kicking game after they went behind on the scoreboard.

Ironically, I think if Exeter had married their power to a kicking strategy closer to what Munster have shown against Leinster over the past four meetings, they’d be planning for a European Cup semi-final instead of wondering how they let a 14-0 lead slip so comprehensively.

Leinster’s win away against the reigning European champions shows up a key truth that often gets ignored in that they are easily one of the top two or three best teams in Europe. In 2019/20, Munster were a team that could easily be described as a top-six in Europe outfit and I think it’s fair to say that after almost a full season without RG Snyman and Joey Carbery, that we are still in that designation.

There has been a narrative of “regression” this season because we couldn’t beat Leinster in the regular season or the PRO14 final and went out at the newly created and COVID forced Round of 16 in Europe. That sounds punchy but I don’t think it stands up to scrutiny. The past four seasons have shown us that when Munster lose big knockout games in Europe, they tend to lose games against the top two or three teams in Europe – your Racing 92s, your Saracens, your Leinsters. Two seasons ago, we lost to Saracens in a semi-final and they went onto win the Champions Cup. Last season, Munster didn’t make it out of a pool where they were drawn with both Racing 92 and Saracens who would be eventual semi-finalists that season. This season we drew Toulouse at random out of the bowl in the Round of 16, another side who will contest a European Cup semi-final at the very least.

I think it’s fair to say that Munster have been championship gate-keepers over the last few seasons because when we’ve lost in Europe, it’s been to teams who have either gone on to win the tournament outright or contest the final at the very least.

So with that context in mind, have Munster regressed, plateaued or progressed?

In a general sense, I think Munster have progressed on last season while plateauing when compared to our gate-keeping status against teams who are at that championship class. Our regular season PRO14 performance was plainly better than it has been for a few seasons but there are no trophies handed out for topping your conference – that is simply a means for better positioning yourself to win a trophy directly that season and indirectly through your ranking for the following season’s European Cup should you make the final.

There were several games this past regular season where I can point to and say, without fear of exaggeration, that we probably lose them the season before. I’m talking about Scarlets away, Benetton away, Connacht at home, Edinburgh at home and maybe even Glasgow away. All those games showed the improved depth and processes of this squad to recover from difficult moments, fight back from deficits and overpower most of the teams we would face over the course of 80 minutes. Those games specifically and things like owning the best away record in the league are proof of Munster’s relative improvement year on year but when we focus on the big games against heavyweight opposition, there has been a relative plateau with regards to results, if not always performance.

We have played Leinster four times post lockdown and maybe did ourselves justice twice out of those four while still losing. We also lost to Toulouse in a game where we probably played as well as we have in a few years against top-end opposition but lost all the same in the end. When we consider where those two opponents are at the moment – they both look like the best sides in Europe this year – our defeats to them take on a new context but Munster do not build year to year to be the team you beat on the way to winning a trophy, even though that has been our role since the reset post-2015/16.

In both losses to Leinster and at key points during the game against Toulouse, Munster’s relative lack of tight power over the full course of an 80-minute contest was a consistent issue. I’ve spoken about this repeatedly in various Wally Ratings and GIF Rooms after these defeats. Is that reductionism? By default, it is, yes. The game is incredibly complex and you can always point to a few outlier performances in a one-off context that don’t rely on physically dominant front five performances – Japan are the usual example that people trot out despite only winning three meaningful games against T1 opposition since 2015 – but in most cases in most tournaments when it comes to consistently winning trophies, 80-minute size and athletic power output in the front five are the one constant in successful teams over the last few years.

The one outlier in that trend this season was our win over ASM Clermont-Auvergne in the Stade Marcel Michelin, which was Munster’s most notable win since the defeat of Toulon in 2017/18 and our most significant away win since that win in Paris against Racing 92 during the 2016/17 season.

Does it matter that it came during the middle of a front five injury crisis in Clermont’s front five that they still haven’t fully recovered from? I think it comes out about equal when you consider we weren’t exactly at full strength in that department either.

The power differential I have consistently referred to is not a fixed value.

For the most part, we have comfortably overpowered most of our opponents in the PRO14 and, I would suggest, Harlequins in Europe. We outlasted Clermont, who did not have their usual forward depth and they ended up burning their starting power players for longer than was optimal. On the other hand, Leinster and Toulouse did not have this issue.

We have a good scrum, statistically and optically. We have a good lineout, statistically and optically. For me, the only area of our forward game that falters down against the top sides has been top-end power output during phase play on both sides of the ball. In a general sense, it didn’t really turn up all that often defensively speaking. We’ve been pretty good on that side of the ball, for the most part, generally speaking. In the PRO14 Munster conceded the least amount of tries and points in the tournament across the regular season despite missing the second-highest number of tackles in the tournament – that alone should give you some pause the next time you see that stat bandied about – but winning PRO14 games and beating mid-level European tier teams wasn’t the problem this year, managing that step up to the very top squads and the physicality they all bring by default was, just as it was against Racing 92 and Saracens in seasons gone by.

The issue isn’t the players in the front five – they are all good players with specific role upsides. Niall Scannell is a good lineout thrower and scrummager. John Ryan is an excellent scrummager and an effective offensive ruck player. James Cronin is a good scrummager and a breakdown threat. Stephen Archer is a good scrummager, a great mauler and a decent ball carrier.

But these things are not what wins trophies on their own, as of late. Time and again, the modern game has shown us that top-end power, weight and athletic output is what teams look for in the front row and only being a complete washout in the scrum or standing on the white line for a hooker is enough to dissuade a coach from that archetype. Look at Taniela Tupou’s initial troubles in the scrum, or Ronán Kelleher’s wobbles at the lineout – you’d live with those problems, even if they never became truly elite in those areas, because of the power they give you during phase play on both sides of the ball.

Essentially, you’d live with the odd bricked lineout or scrum penalty when you have a physical output like Ronán Kelleher produced in the collision on both sides of the ball against Exeter.

When you already have that kind of power output, that’s where guys like Stephen Archer, John Ryan and Niall Scannell become incredibly valuable as role players to compliment that power output with positional specialities. When you are relying on those same role specialists for the kind of oppressive physical output you need from your front five, you run into collective issues against the very biggest sides. It is never a case of the individuals not being good enough – they are plainly good players – it’s that collectively, the power output on both sides of the collision falls against the likes of Leinster, Peak Saracens, Racing 92 and Toulouse.

I think next season will be the season where they get will hopefully get to show that role strength alongside a fit Dave Kilcoyne and a developing core of young heavy carrying front row players.

They should be augmented by the reemergence of RG Snyman and the incoming Jason Jenkins. It is in that environment that Munster’s attacking development can be truly judged. What we learned this season was, that while we had certainly improved on the previous season, we are not blowing anyone away that we wouldn’t be expecting to anyway. 

That isn’t preventing us from winning games – the opposite in fact as we won 87% of our regular-season games last year, the highest win percentage of any of Munster’s PRO14/PRO12/Magners League/Rabo/Celtic League in the modern era with Rassie’s 2016/17 86% season the only one that comes close. Does that signal an improvement or a general regression in league quality? A little of both, I feel.

How you perceive Munster’s attacking work by looking at raw statistics depends on whether you get your stats from the PRO14 site or Munster’s site. For example, the PRO14 site credits us with only 80 clean breaks while the Munster site has us down for 113. Both operate off different stat crunching services – neither is entered manually – so relying too much on these statistics to paint pictures, either way, is unreliable, for me.

We know for certain that Munster had the lowest number of tries scored and the fewest try bonus points scored out of the four Irish provinces during the regular PRO14 season. What is the cause of this? It’s hard to pin it down to just one thing.

A more difficult schedule played its part. Munster had more away games than usual, plus we played against relatively strong selections but that alone isn’t it. Sure, playing the Edinburgh sides that Munster did twice were objectively stronger than the one that rocked up to the RDS to receive their walloping, for example, but that’s a product of test window management and injuries, which all the sides had to endure.

You could make an argument that being without Joey Carbery for the vast majority of the season played a key role but one could easily say that he would have been away with Ireland for most of the season had he been this season (or last season).

In truth, it feels like Munster are still in a transitional phase to where we want to be, offensively speaking. You saw flashes of real attacking cohesion all season – most often when Craig Casey was working scrumhalf – when we managed to combine real width off #9 with the power advantage we generally held over most of the PRO14 teams we faced.

This particular example showcased the kind of variety I think we’re working towards. Casey’s laser passing off the ruck, the handling out of the screen, the layers of attack, the massive collision win by Kleyn off #9 – another key attacking player for us – and the hands to create the finish. I spoke last week about truly complete teams being top class in attack and defence but making points of difference in attack transition and defensive transition. Munster are still developing in attack but I feel they are developing along an upward curve that will only improve with time. Defensively, we have shown to be good too, albeit with the power proviso I’ve spoken about against the top 3/4 teams in Europe.

We’re one of the best teams in Europe when it comes to defensive transition but our work in attack transition has been consistently lacking, on the very biggest days at least. There’s always an exception – look at Shane Daly’s try against Scarlets, for example – but in general, when the heat goes up in the big games this season, Leinster and Toulouse were quite comfortable kicking the ball to us repeatedly.

We weren’t able to hurt them consistently on transition. As much as our overall power differential across 80 minutes needs to be bigger and better, our counter-attacking production needs to improve on the big days and in general. The signing of Simon Zebo should help in that regard. His addition alone takes Munster’s production on transition attack to a higher level.

For large stretches of the season – and I’ve spent the last week watching every game back – I got the impression that Munster were playing an attacking game that seemed like a halfway house between “small ball” and the kind of ball we signed RG Snyman to play.

We are at a stage of development where we are quite reliant on having certain key players available to us to play the scheme I think we want to play most weeks. For me, those are Kilcoyne, Snyman, Kleyn, Beirne, Stander (now Coombes), Murray/Casey, Carbery, De Allende, maybe Earls. We have other hugely important players who play key roles for us – O’Mahony and Farrell for example – but when we are without those core scheme players, we do not currently have the extended depth to keep playing like for like week after week after week.

Losing Snyman for the entire season, for example, was disproportionately disruptive to our ideal attacking scheme. You never expect to have a key forward available all season for every game – not everybody is a CJ Stander – but there are guys you just cannot afford to lose for an entire season. For Munster, that’s Snyman, Kilcoyne and Carbery and, during extended international breaks, Beirne and Stander/Coombes.

When you see Munster playing one way in the PRO14 and then tightening up – conceptually and structurally – for a “bigger” game a week later, it’s this principle in action. That gap was more obvious last season but it was still present at times this season. Ultimately, I think we are too strong across the tight five for most of the teams we face in the PRO14 in and out of test windows and slightly underpowered over 80 minutes against the teams we’ll always need to beat to win trophies.

It’s never about having one game plan and then a completely different one as a “Plan B”. No one is going to play like Japan one minute and then like the Springboks the next. That is a fantasy created by people who only deal in hindsight. It’s about having a layered game plan that can roll through the gears with a stripped back way of playing when you are under duress. Leinster, for example, when they feel threatened on the gainline will kick the ball long to you, chase, bring their big defensive hitters in the middle of the field into your half of the field and slow your ball. They will keep doing this until it produces something they can launch with. Does that mean they are a kicking team? No. It means they use their kicking game to bring their physical advantage in contact through the forwards back into the game by changing where the game was being played.

Munster’s alt-game remains the box kick, for the most part, which is still a hugely effective way of playing but it shapes perception about the quality of your game – unfairly, in my opinion. It is a way of kicking to change the scenery, no different than a long kick downfield from #10, but it is not viewed as such by most commentators on the game and this shapes the narrative about “ambition”, especially when Munster are defined by how we play against a “bigger” Leinster side. Next season, when Munster hopefully have Jenkins, Coombes, Snyman, Kilcoyne, Kleyn, Hodnett and a further developed Knox, Wycherley Brothers, Salanoa and others so there won’t be a massive need to box kick as much against bigger teams because we’ll be able to play bigger than we were this season.

Until that size change is fully in place – and I think the ingredients to do so are either in the province or signed to be in the province ahead of next season – we can talk about attacking expansion but it won’t fully show until we have parity with the biggest teams over 80 minutes. That is a cardinal rule of the game that we just cannot play around until the fundamental physics of the game change.

***

Whenever you don’t win a trophy, any talk of what you might do to rectify that the following season becomes a bit of a punchline.

Maybe next year, maybe next year, maybe next year. Ten years down the line, it can be draining to talk about, especially when the team you are constantly compared with are winning PRO14 titles every season and are a live contender to win European silverware year after year for the most part.

There’s a tendency to view any season that Munster don’t win a trophy as a failure and I subscribe to that thinking, in a way. Munster are a team that have been defined by big, trophy-winning days from the late ’90s to 2011 so celebrating “making a final” or “getting beaten by the teams that contest the final” is a bad road to go down. It doesn’t mean that having our best regular season in years is worthless, all of a sudden, it just means that there are no trophies handed out for that. Munster want to win trophies so any year that ends without that goal being achieved is a failure by default. That’s the pressure that comes with being one of the biggest teams in Europe.

The main hope is the younger players who have been promoted from the Academy en-masse this season – one of the largest collective promotions in the recent history of the club – begin to develop into options all through the depth chart next season.

I’m not expecting or demanding any of these guys to turn into category one starters next season. As is usual with large groups, some will shoot up the depth chart, some will be injured and some will take time moving up the depth chart. It’s not unreasonable to assume that some will struggle with the transition to senior status as some always do. Whatever happens, the key players in this young group will be given appropriate time to build on their top tier potential and their success is intrinsically linked with Munster’s success going forward, both in the short and long term.

As for next season – and the Rainbow Cup, which is technically still this season but will feature enough transition to warrant being a halfway point between this season just gone and next season – Munster are still very much in “win now” territory. The gap between ourselves and the teams lifting trophies seems as large as it ever has but I think it might be smaller than it’s cool to admit in April 2021.

Getting RG Snyman fit is a key part of the puzzle, as is keeping Joey Carbery fit and active. Jenkins’ addition beefs up our category one ball-carrying rotation to the point that he, Snyman and Irish international Jean Kleyn in combination with just one or two of Knox, Salanoa and Wycherley becoming regular matchday squad regulars gives us the kind of heft in the front five that will unlock what we’re trying to do elsewhere.

With guys like Coombes, Casey, Crowley, Healy, Hodnett, O’Sullivan, Fineen Wycherley, Flannery and others continuing their development alongside established test quality like Kilcoyne, O’Mahony, and Beirne – Munster have the potential to snap the streak if and only if key tight five forwards remain relatively fit and available during the season.

At least that’s how it feels after a two-week process of watching all of Munster’s game back again with a cold eye. The answer is simple; when we get top-end 80-minute power, the rest of our game will follow.

Until then, it’ll be glass ceilings and recrimination.

***

TRK Seasonal Awards 2020/21

TRK Senior Player of the Season 2020/21: Gavin Coombes
(Honourable mention: Kevin O’Byrne, Jack O’Donoghue, Jean Kleyn, Tadhg Beirne, Craig Casey)

TRK Young Player of the Season 2020/21: Josh Wycherley
(Honourable mention: John Hodnett, Ben Healy, Thomas Ahern)

Breakout Moment of the Season 2020/21: Josh Wycherley’s performance against Clermont in the Stade Marcel Michelin.
(Honourable mention: Thomas Ahern’s break against Zebre, John Hodnett’s stretch of games pre-injury, Ben Healy’s long-range winner on the opening day of the season away to Scarlets)