Connacht 10 Munster 8

A deeply concerning loss in the Sportsground

Sure, it was a narrow loss on the scoreboard but this was a game that Munster lost while hardly throwing a shot during a deeply disappointing InterPro defeat.

Match Importance

Match Quality

Intensity

Standard of Opposition

4.1

I think I know what Munster’s plan for this game was. I saw a lot of stuff online about how Munster had “no plan” here but I don’t think that’s true. I think the plan was to beat up Connacht in defence, force turnovers, kick to pressure – long and box – and then punish them at the maul/scrum until scoring was inevitable.

We did half the job pretty well and failed abysmally at the other half.

What you do on a rugby field is what you planned to do, for the most part. Coaches don’t control players with a Playstation controller. They run them through the expected game plan the week before the game after conducting analysis on the opposition. What you do during the game reflects your preparation. In the aftermath of a loss, people will often talk about no “plan B” but teams don’t really have a plan B in the way that most people understand it.

You have your primary mechanic for playing and that’s it. You can’t really play a little bit of Japan in the first half and, if that’s not working, play like the 2019 Springboks in the second half. Most teams don’t have the players to do that effectively – maybe one or the other to varying degrees – or even the intellectual bandwidth to train that way. You have your style that you work on in pre-season and then you have your week to week tweaking for the opposition with elements you can add or take away depending on the circumstances with the idea of peaking in bursts as required – athletically, mentally and stylistically.

That’s the idea, anyway.

In the last few weeks, Munster have essentially had to go back to a form of a preseason. Large swathes of the playing group went well over a month without playing, three weeks without training together and all during the most important part of the season. The gains we got in possible immunity to the coronavirus pale in comparison to the loss of match sharpness and training cohesion – the ability to slip into the flow of the system that’s laid down through drills, analysis and other game prep. This isn’t a kick-around in the park. Small margins matter.

This Munster group had two days of training ahead of Castres as a unit. They then prepped for Leinster but broke off early because of Leinster’s covid issues and had four days off around Christmas that would otherwise have been training and more match “data” being processed by the group. They had their first full training week since the last week of October this week. It’s like having a must-win Champions Cup pool decider in your fourth week of preseason.

Does that explain the extremely limited game we saw here?

Perhaps. We had a Pass Per Carry rating of 0.76, which is the lowest rating I have for Munster in a number of seasons. That’s 45 passes with 59 carries on 41% possession. Remember that dour loss to Leinster in Thomond Park last season? That had a PPC rating of 1.0. This was worst than that performance by an order of magnitude. For context, two weeks ago Castres had a PPC rating of 0.71 in Thomond Park.

Those metrics don’t just happen in a game. You don’t plan on playing a lot of on-ball rugby and accidentally end up with a 0.76 PPC rating. This can only have been by design.

Now, just because you pass a lot relative to the carries you make doesn’t mean you win – Connacht could easily have lost this game despite passing the ball 170 (!) times – but when you kick and grind as we attempted here, you’d better win because if you don’t, you’ll deserve all the pelters you get and then some.

That’s what will make this game so difficult for Munster fans to stomach this morning. All the articles, all the commentary, all the venom on social media will be 100% deserved in this instance and those are the kinds of bad vibes that can linger.

So what gives? Why did we play like this?

Well, it would probably be close to the plan you would likely put into place against a dangerous opponent away from home with a large group of players still finding their match legs after one game in two months and who will need to be brought up to speed in line with their mental and physical readiness post-South Africa for the even more important games to come in January.

Even allowing for that disruption – which we have to acknowledge to get a full, fair picture – this performance against Connacht was incredibly, desperately, deflatingly poor.

I get the logic of the tactics chosen for this game.

• Rinse Connacht in defensive contact, force them into conceding turnovers by overplaying or kicking the ball away, you then kick long to exit and challenge their lineout. You generate this game state by being comfortable trading kicks with Connacht until they run back at you in transition. We were actually fairly successful at this.
• Use the maul as the primary focus of the attack to the point that you win cascading penalties that make scoring inevitable. Use that threat to establish a flow of possession to De Allende and Farrell which you can then use to bring your back three and small forward into play. This was our primary failing.
• Get to close range and execute heavy and often, build a score until Connacht start to chase the game and make errors. This, in combination with the maul being stuffed at key points, put the game into “could go anywhere” territory and away from what we would have schemed for, resulting in a narrow loss.

In practice, this is Playing Big and to do that, you need to Select Big. This is a game plan that needs your biggest lock combination, a half-lock, a power forward and then whatever you want to go with for the other spot. You could pick a Combo Flanker if you really want to double down on the lineout or a small forward carrier to give you more threat off the lineout or lineout maul but if you’re going to kick and grind, you need that size.

But we didn’t do that. We went with Jean Kleyn – totally cool – and then paired him with Fineen Wycherley who is certainly a good lineout operator but who is still somewhat undersized for the second row at this level. We then paired Coombes – a good power forward – with a young Small Forward making his first pro-start in Alex Kendellen and Jack O’Donoghue, a Combo Flanker with a good defensive and offensive lineout, good wide carrying but limited power in contact or offensively in the maul.

We didn’t select Jason Jenkins – our 125kg, 6’8″ power-forward tighthead lock hybrid – who, you would imagine, was signed for games just like this. Was he injured? We don’t know. This game plan would have suited him down the ground as a heavy mauler, power and brutal inside carrier at close range.

But he wasn’t in Galway, for whatever reason, he was hanging around with RG Snyman around Limerick. But that’s OK, we have other players, albeit more unsuited for the style of play we deliberately chose to use. As ever, your pack construction tells you about the game you will end up playing, rather than the game you want to play. In an ideal world, those will be the same.

For example, we don’t have a tonne of impact ball carriers in the front row at the moment. That isn’t and has never been Niall Scannell’s or Stephen Archer’s game so it’s tough to judge them on that. Why is Niall Scannell running our tap and go sequences and losing the first collision more often than not? Not sure. Dave Kilcoyne still has a bit of zip as a ball carrier but it isn’t what it was a few seasons ago, which is to be expected at 33 years of age.

Jeremy Loughman hasn’t really shown that game consistently, Diarmuid Barron looks to be a different type of player and, while Keynan Knox certainly has the size and profile for that role, only having one or two power players in the pack means you essentially have none. Why? Because a team like Connacht can and will swarm those players and make it incredibly difficult for them to form compressions with a game plan as boiled down as this one.

So we played an extremely low PPC game which stresses your defence but mostly your ability to grind tight opportunities with a smaller pack. We had multiple close-range opportunities that, given how we chose to play, we had to take. We didn’t have the heft to execute.

Even if we only manage to convert two of those chances, Connacht go behind by two scores and have to start overplaying, which would bring our impact defence more to the fore and produce more opportunities for us as Connacht overheat. They’d knock on, we’d scrum, cheese the clock, kick deep and force them off-plan.

The result would then look after itself, bar freak occurrences which are always possible but if we got to 60 minutes two scores up, we win nines times out of ten.

Instead, we blew all of those opportunities, handed a tonne of momentum to Connacht repeatedly and then ended up losing a tight game after a needless yellow card that should have been red.

You get what you plan for.

We planned for a heavy, kick and grind game but didn’t select our heaviest pack. It’s like deciding to go for a hike but leaving your walking boots at home because it was your flip flop’s turn to be used that week. Sure, it’s doable but harder than it needs to be and you’ll probably end up quitting the hike halfway through.

We pride ourselves on playing smart rugby. Knowing when to kick, when to hang onto the ball – that kind of thing. But then I see plays like this in the last five minutes with an opportunity to decisively snatch the game and we’re kicking the ball away with a deep three-man overlap?

How is this happening? Why, with a chance to snatch the win in the dying embers of the game, do we let a chance like this go to waste for the sake of booting the ball upfield on a kick chase? Is this “smart rugby”? I don’t think so. This could be Damian De Allende making a mistake, or it could be game plan conditions dictating his decision making above playing what’s literally in front of him.

But this moment is an extension of our general poor work on transition where we are constantly overthinking our use of the boot. Ben Healy’s attempted drop goal on a deep transition is one thing – a young player snatching at a big moment – but it came from another transition where we just ambled across the pitch away from numbers and towards a Connacht surge. Watch Haley here – he runs across De Allende before firing a pass to Daly, who has no option but to kick and chase.

When Healy gets the ball back after the deep exit, he has no options around him because Daly and Haley were burned on the previous transition. He’s only got one isolated forward ahead of him, a fully covered Connacht backfield to guard against the 50/22 so… what other options did he have besides running into contact with a packed Connacht line rushing up?

This isn’t a new phenomenon either. Our counterattack has been consistently poor this season because it relates to the execution of space. We can take obvious, glaring opportunities – as we did against the Sharks in round one – but generally we really struggle when teams kick the ball to us consistently. They are comfortable defending us on transition and, when we don’t have the power to hurt them on the reset phases post-transition, we can look toothless and incapable of landing a shot on any decent team.

Connacht will get beaten by any serious team in the URC or Heineken Cup this season but the worrying thing is that we are not amongst them right now. Add in Beirne, O’Mahony, Earls, Zebo, Carbery and Murray to that matchday squad and we’re closer – but how much closer? Enough to win? Maybe, but I’m not sure. Perhaps we make smarter decisions or win a few more penalties, but the game plan would probably have been similar and that’s the problem.

Neither the senior coaches nor players come out of this game with any credit. This game will be a stick to beat the group with for months to come and it puts enormous pressure on next week’s game against Ulster, who we have loaded up our internationals for. Lose that game and we are in serious jeopardy in the Irish Shield and could even struggle with a top 8 finish depending on how we transition into the next block of the season, especially as the Sharks and Bulls begin to rack up wins at home.

The Bad Vibes from this game will linger long after the game and could become toxic if they aren’t blown out soon. Munster aren’t in crisis – just two losses all season – but the perception battle is being comprehensively lost about what this club is trying to do on-field and off. Two senior coaches deciding to leave – one of them after signing a new deal before activating an exit clause – before two dour performances in a row have evaporated all the feel-good factor post-Wasps. It doesn’t matter if that feel-good factor was a false impression based on beating a 14 man team who were the only side in Europe more fucked than we were with player unavailability but it felt real.

Instead, the last two weeks feel like a 10-pint hangover and an opportunity squandered.

We need to bounce back, and soon, or the season could badly spin out of control.

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.