You just don’t realise the impact of a sizeable crowd at a rugby game until they’re gone and then, crucially, when they come back.
When you’re watching on TV, you can almost get fooled by the artificial crowd noise. It’s heavy on the ear at first but after a while, it blends into the background, like the commentators, pundits, digital swooshes with the matchday graphics and the ads. Experiencing a real Thomond Park crowd in person is like eating good Chicken Hut after a year of bad salad. It’s electric. It’s unpredictable. It makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up and believe me, I value those hairs on my neck quite a lot because they refuse to grow on my head. I know when they feel it. And in Thomond Park last night, they felt it.
There were around 11,000 people in the stadium last night but man, they were loud. When the team did the half lap of the pitch into the dressing room after the warmup, the noise that rained down from the East Stand to greet them made me genuinely emotional.
It’s good to be back and it’s good to see you back, too, is my point.
Long may it last.
♛♛♛
Before the game, I wrote about the Sharks being quite a flawed team, offensively and defensively. I figured that Munster would win, don’t get me wrong, but I didn’t think it’d be the hiding we saw here on both sides of the ball.
I expected quite a bit better from the Sharks in this game. Sure, they were without Mapimpi, Fassi, Nkosi, Am, Kolisi, Nche and Mbonambi due to the Rugby Championship but there was more than enough quality on the field to perform better than what we saw here, offensively anyway.
Even if we concede a lot of possession to the Sharks, there is an element of predictability about their schemes in that 3-2-X system. There’s very little that they do that we haven’t seen before but the impact of Du Toit, Grobler, Le Roux Roets, Venter, Van Vuuren and Phepsi Buthelezi on-ball can create spacing for their dangerous outside runners that will hurt us if we can’t stop them in key central positions.
We denied the Sharks a lot of possession and consistently stopped them when they were on the attack. Even if elements of their attack were predictable – and inaccurate at times, with Pienaar an unexpected offender – it wouldn’t matter if Munster couldn’t stop their ball carriers. That’s the thing with predictability. It’s fine and well knowing something is coming, it’s another thing to actually stop it but Munster did really well here with multiple good stops early on to set the tone.
You can see some of the general principles here;
When it worked, the Sharks looked like they could have been out there all game and not score any more than their early penalty.
When we got it wrong, it produced the one genuinely created try of the night for the Sharks.
But that was a relative rarity on a night where the Munster pack pieced up a very big, very strong Sharks pack in the loose, in the maul and at the scrum.
The scrum domination was a surprise in the stadium – the Sharks conceded multiple penalties under pressure – but I’m not sure if it should have been if that makes sense? John Ryan is a really effective scrummager; it’s his best trait.
Kilcoyne has always been underrated in that area of the game and the excellent Niall Scannell is a real powerhouse in this area of the game. Scannell, in particular, had a real steadying influence against a strong Sharks front five unit.
That was backed up well by the replacement front row – Knox was particularly impressive – who continued the pressure.
With the 21 stone Le Roux Roets scrummaging on the tighthead side, Munster would need all the bracing we could get and then some from Kleyn and Wycherley – both stood up to the physical challenge incredibly well and dominated their opposite numbers in most facets of the game, not just at the set-piece.
Offensively, we ran through some decent sequences with a lot of depth and a constant desire to move the ball to the flanks. Scannell and Haley rotated with Carbery really well, Haley in particular. Scannell, too, continued his upward trend of the last season with a 1.6 pass per carry rating (on trend with his Rainbow Cup performances). If it felt like Munster were passing more than what might be considered normal, it’s because we were.
We had a collective pass per carry rating of 1.31 in this game.
For reference, our home loss to Leinster last December we had a pass per carry rating of 1.00.
Our loss in last season’s PRO14 final to Leinster had a PPC rating of 1.05.
Our loss to Toulouse a week later had a rating of 1.08.
Our win over Leinster in the RDS in the Rainbow Cup had a rating of 1.38.
To put it into perspective, the Springboks loss to the All Blacks in the Rugby Championship on Saturday morning had a PPC rating of 0.96. Leinster’s rating against the Bulls was 1.14.
Your pass per carry rating doesn’t mean more success or more wins, but it does give you an idea of what you’re trying to do in possession.
That expansion in our passing was tempered, somewhat, by a number of handling and passing errors throughout the game.
That’s the kind of thing you’d expect both for an early-season game and an early-season game where you are trying to pass the ball more. The more you try to play, the more errors you are likely to ship. When you play one out rugby, it’s to cut down on the number of variables that lead to these errors to when you see passing, know that sometimes it will come with the risk of turnovers.
When it works, though, it really works.
If our passing and this approach can scale up as the season develops, it’ll be interesting, let’s put it that way.
♛♛♛
Pre-game, I spoke about how Munster could have some luck targeting the transition zone around the sides of the maul. The principle was that heavier Sharks forwards would be slower to transition from their lineout lifting/jumping roles and that, as a result, either the covering scrumhalf on the touchline or the area directly outside the lineout/maul could be targeted for gains. Munster went after both of those zones a fair bit to pretty good results.
We also chased after the area outside the peak of the Sharks lineout defence, again to pretty good results.
We consistently managed to hurt the Sharks off our launches and they struggled to live with our tempo. That seemed to play out in a lot of breakdown penalties as the Sharks looked to get the likes of Thomas Du Toit in heavy over our ruck. The idea seemed to be to stress the effectiveness of our offensive breakdown in a way that the likes of Leinster and Saracens have done in the past by levering their heaviest forwards over the ball.
They didn’t manage to do that consistently and were repeatedly penalised for a number of breakdown offences under pressure. It was a killer for them. In theory, slowing Munster down at the breakdown leads to a box kick, which I felt that the Sharks were set up to receive and attack – Buthelezi made some good gains here in particular – but our contestable box kicking was way lower than normal. The majority of our kicking off #9 was to touch and way more balanced between the halfbacks.
Our tries mostly came from executing close-range opportunities at a fairly efficient rate. It was far from perfect but we showed we had the heft to move a big Sharks pack about from close range, which is a pretty good indicator in and of itself.
Despite winning six tries to two and by 25 clear points on the day, I still feel that Munster left a fair few more scores out there.
As starts to the season go, however, this was pretty good. Imperfect, plenty to work on, but good all the same.
It’s good to be back.
Notable Players
I felt Dan Goggin and Joey Carbery had below par games.
Both were pretty heavily involved throughout their time on the field but both struggled to impact as they’d have liked. Goggin had some really good moments – the kick through assist for the final try, a good offload, some good carries – but racked up a fair few handling errors in different situations. A bit more accuracy on even half of those moments and this is a four-star performance – those are the margins. He’ll be back.
Carbery had a difficult enough game, on the whole. His goal kicking was a little below his usual level, for a start, and his work around the field could be described as the same with a few uncharacteristic errors, especially towards the end of his time on the field.
I thought Jean Kleyn had another excellent game doing what he does best, scrummaging, winning collisions on both sides of the ball and impacting in the maul. Very very solid.
Fineen Wycherley had a super solid game. Good, hard, physical stuff against big opposition. There’s a quiet confidence about this guy from what I saw here and that’s always encouraging to see.
I thought Jack O’Donoghue and Peter O’Mahony were really good as hyper-aggressive combo-flankers alongside Gavin Coombes. They patrolled the wider channels well on both sides of the ball, did really well at the lineout and set the tone with some aggressive breakdown work.
Gavin Coombes was his usual self with some outstanding close range carries and yet more evidence that he’s borderline unstoppable from inside 5m.
Keynan Knox was really impressive off the bench, both in the scrum and in contact. He looks to have stepped up a gear on the evidence of what I saw here. All six front rows played well.
Niall Scannell really stood out to me. His lineout throwing was very nearly flawless while he showed up well carrying the ball when he got a bit of space to go to work. He carried 10 times, which normally is a worry for me on his overall role but I thought he did really well in this game when he got the opportunity to get on ball, with only one poor rip and a lost collision early on as a blot on the copybook. His defence was really good and his scrummaging looked really effective from what I could make out on the watch back. A really strong performance that would have done his chances of getting back into the Ireland conversation no harm at all.
Mike Haley is one of the most underrated players in the country and this performance was another one of those performances that make you wonder why he’s not closer to the test team. He stepped in as a primary ball-handler really efficiently and carried well, all while patrolling the backfield with his usual excellence.
I thought Craig Casey had another staggeringly mature performance, with only one slow exit that got turned over as a freekick in the negative column. The quality of his passing and the pace of his game is outstanding and they feel like really key components to what we’re trying to do offensively. Every time I see him play, I think “that’s a future Munster captain right there” and I just can’t shake that idea. Quality.
Simon Zebo had a dream return to Munster. Scoring a breakaway try where he left everyone for dead a few seconds after Donal Lenihan joked about his fitness on the RTE comms was just typical Simon Zebo, wasn’t it? From the minute his name got announced over the tannoy pre-game to a massive cheer, you knew this was going to be a big one for Zebo. The crowd were willing the ball to him and his return to the #11 shirt brought about plenty of opportunities for him to stretch his legs and worry defenders, all while keeping the work under the high ball to a very high standard.
The crowd loves Zebo and he loves them too – it’s a symbiotic relationship that has real power and I get the feeling that with a bit of luck with injury, Simon Zebo could have an awful lot to say this season in both red and green.
The Wally Ratings: Sharks (H)
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 |
|---|---|
| Dave Kilcoyne | ★★★★ |
| Niall Scannell | ★★★★ |
| John Ryan | ★★★★ |
| Jean Kleyn | ★★★★ |
| Fineen Wycherley | ★★★★ |
| Peter O'Mahony | ★★★★ |
| Jack O'Donoghue | ★★★★ |
| Gavin Coombes | ★★★★ |
| Craig Casey | ★★★★ |
| Joey Carbery | ★★ |
| Simon Zebo | ★★★★ |
| Rory Scannell | ★★★★ |
| Dan Goggin | ★★ |
| Andrew Conway | ★★★ |
| Mike Haley | ★★★★ |
| Diarmuid Barron | ★★★ |
| Jeremy Loughman | ★★★★ |
| Keynan Knox | ★★★★ |
| RG Snyman | ★★★ |
| Tom Ahern | ★★★ |
| Rowan Osborne | ★★★ |
| Ben Healy | ★★★ |
| Chris Cloete | ★★★ |
