As Peter O’Mahony said in the press conference on Wednesday afternoon, Munster have gone through way more difficult weeks than these last few. October 2016 is the ultimate perspective check, after all. Compared to those weeks, these last few have been a walk in the park. That’s not to downplay these past weeks by any means. They have been unendingly rubbish to varying degrees for the players quarantining in South Africa, those quarantining in hotels and at home here and those who are currently sick with the virus. It has been stressful. It has been a whirlwind of anxiety and uncertainty. It has been beyond difficult.

But this is a hardy club with hardy players.

We will go on.

The question is how? Like, literally, on-field how will Munster manage to field a team capable of getting a win this weekend? If we have to go to Wasps with a mixed and matched side of test players and young talent – as seems likely – how do you prepare a team to do that for a game of this scale?

We have talented players in the academy, guys with real potential but how do you go from playing AIL and A games to the European Cup in a span of two weeks?

By simplifying.

Playing at the elite level is complex. Very complex. Want to have a look at some phase play layouts from the test game over the last few years? These would be relatively out of date by this stage but they’ll give you an idea of the complexity that would be in something as simple as taking the ball off #9. Have a read of this and note how many times you find yourself thinking “what does that mean?”

What does Shark mean?

What does X mean?

What does Dog mean?

And this is just one layout. Most elite sides have many, many more and this doesn’t even begin to address the complexity of the lineout, the attack OFF the lineout, the scrum, transition maps etc. If you’re a young player coming into the senior set-up, you’re going to be getting up to speed on things just like this.

It is not an easy thing to do. When we talk about coaching teams needing to bed in and the importance of consistency and continuity, it’s because the complexity the modern game demands. Coaches set down what a team does on the field and players, through training, match repetition, and review learn this plan, the calls, the offensive schemes over time until it becomes second nature.

That’s why winning teams are, so often, teams with a consistent coaching structure over three/four years. It’s almost impossible to learn this level of complexity in the two weeks since it became a possibility that a large proportion of the matchday squad were likely to be making their senior debut for Munster in the European Cup. Some of the guys in the frame for this game would have been in the environment for the last number of years, one way or the other. Daniel Okeke, for example, is Year 1 academy this year but he’s been running in Munster training to varying levels since the return post-lockdown. A lot of the players in line to start this game would have similar experiences with varying levels of involvement. The key to this is “reps”. How many touches of the ball are you getting in the drills that make up the core elements of the game plan? How many training minutes do you get in core roles? This often relates directly to match day preparation itself. Players who are starting get a lot of the week to week minutes with deeper depth chart guys making up “opposition” in contested drills and other “live” sessions.

A lot of the guys involved in the last two weeks would have been lucky to have been regularly involved in opposition drills beyond pre-season before going back to play club rugby, do exams… I don’t know, get haircuts? What do 18 and 19-year-old young lads even do these days? For most guys, they scale up their knowledge of the inner workings of elite rugby as their involvement increases from PTS/NTS to Irish u20s, perhaps, to Year 1 academy and then on upwards. This is a complex game, and that’s before we even consider the physical demands, which are greater now than they have ever been.

The key to success for Munster – and success, in this instance, being judged by players being able to just play without getting lost in the weeds on detail – is to simplify roles, create clarity at the set-piece and lean heavily on the international quality players in the group.

So, strategically, how to Munster approach this game with simplicity as a key point of detail in the build-up?

In essence, the core decision comes down to whether we want to play on-ball or off-ball. Do we want to run with a lot of possession playing a very direct style off #9 and using De Allende and Farrell – if selected as a pair – as primary carriers? Or do we play a form of kick pressure that utilises Conway and Earls as aerial threats and look to play off transition as Wasps kick to reset? Both styles come with pros and cons.

If Munster play a primary on-ball game – where we kick conservatively in our own half but look to run through very direct phases off #9 when inside Wasps 10m line. If we were to map it into zones of play, we’d run it basically like this;

This takes advantage of Murray’s kicking mostly with Conway’s aerial threat and aggressive chase tracking coming to the fore against a Wasps side with more than a few backline injuries themselves. This also doubles down on the defensive tracking and impact of Damian De Allende on the first phases post-transition where Wasps will want to play ball and, in some regards, are set up to play ball.

That simplifies a lot of things for our younger forwards who have to chase, ID threats and then apply as much line speed as possible in a situation where we can scheme what Wasps will want to do.

We might decide to play on-ball but I can see us kicking quite heavily to lean on where we are experienced, with a hope that our lineout and scrum can hold up under scrutiny.