With the end of the Heineken Cup bloc over and done with, Munster are about to head into a familiar, if soon to be extinct, form of URC matchplay – the test window. That might be the “dreaded” test window depending on where your heart lies in this league. If you’re Welsh or Scottish, test window’s usually meant shipping nasty defeats to Irish provinces featuring guys who don’t even have a Wikipedia page yet. For the Irish provinces, it’s mostly a chance to get a look at some of the younger players and down-chart squad guys who have their eyes on bigger things. In the closed-loop system of Irish rugby where the national side and the depth charts relating to the national side take primacy from everything to who plays when and how many minutes they play to who you can sign from outside, games like this against Zebre are one of the few “free” weeks where the coaches have something of a clean slate to work with.
I don’t know about you, but I find these Clean Slate games to be a fascinating story within the wider story of a season. What young players will take their opportunities? You need only look at a guy like Diarmuid Barron and how he’s gone from a Clean Slate game guy to featuring in every single Heineken Cup game this season as an example of how taking opportunities can lead to bigger opportunities down the road.
Our opponents this week, the newly renamed Zebre Parma, find themselves in a tough spot at the time of writing. They are winless this season at the time of writing with six losses in the URC and three losses in the Challenge Cup. To be fair, they have had the most amount of disruption you can have in a given season this year. They were caught by the Omicron Incident too – although not to the same level as Munster and Cardiff – and they’ve parted ways with their head coach Michael Bradley mid-way through the season, replacing him with his former assistant Emiliano Bergamaschi.
That isn’t the entire story with their lack of wins but it does go some way to explaining why things have been so bad this season. That said, I don’t think anyone was expecting all that much of a side with only four wins domestically since October 2020 but this season has been particularly bad and that’s why Bradley was “relieved of his post as head coach of the franchise.”
Zebre are in a tough spot at the moment but it literally can’t get any worse than it’s been this season as is so, in that regard, this is something of a Clean Slate for them too.
Zebre Parma: 15. Junior Laloifi, 14. Pierre Bruno, 13. Erich Cronjé, 12. Enrico Lucchin, 11. Jacopo Trulla, 10. Timothy O’Malley, 9. Marcello Violi, 1. Paolo Buonfiglio, 2. Oliviero Fabiani, 3. Eduardo Bello, 4. David Sisi (c), 5. Andrea Zambonin, 6. Liam Mitchell, 7. Iacopo Bianchi, 8. Renato Giammarioli
Replacements: 16. Massimo Ceciliani, 17. Andrea Lovotti, 18. Giosuè Zilocchi, 19. Leonard Krumov, 20. Potu Junior Leavasa , 21. Alessandro Fusco, 22. Antonio Rizzi, 23. Giulio Bisegni
Zebre Parma are impossible to get footage of since Michael Bradley’s departure. They’ve had one game total in 2022 – a loss at home in the Challenge Cup to Worcester – since Bergamaschi has taken over at the start of the month so it’s impossible for me to say what they’re doing differently post-Bradley because I just haven’t seen them.
What I can tell you is that Zebre Parma have the third-lowest average kick per game ratio in the United Rugby Championship, one of the worst lineouts in the tournament and one of the lowest scoring attacks anywhere in Europe in raw terms and a game to game average.
Every league has its teams who inhabit the lower tiers and Zebre happen to be that side in the URC right now. Like Bath, Worcester and the likes of Brive and Biarittz in the TOP14, they find themselves trapped in the quicksand of multiple losses. Like real quicksand, the harder you struggle against the run of losses, the harder and deeper those losses suck you in.
Maybe Bergamaschi will be able to give Zebre Parma the fresh start they need to build into a more positive 2022. In all likelihood, he won’t manage that in any meaningful way but that doesn’t mean Zebre aren’t capable of making things messy for Munster this weekend in the Stadio Sergio Lanfranchi.
The weather for Saturday’s game is set to be bone dry and pleasant. When you combine that with Zebre’s tendency to not kick that much relative to their opposition, the stage could be set for a lot of on-ball action from a Munster perspective.
When the opposition doesn’t kick a lot relative to Munster, we tend to be more proactive in possession and the team selected here, young as they are, would suggest that’s likely to be the case.
Whenever Michael Bradley spoke about Zebre’s issues this season it didn’t take long to recognise a familiar pattern in his internal work-ons – “we need to hang onto the ball better and build more phases”. Whatever has happened in the weeks since his departure, that constant work-on is the sign of a club that want to play on-ball to maximise what they have. Against Worcester they only kicked 18 times, which is fairly middle of the road in the modern game.
There is value in kicking the ball to Zebre and then allowing them to give you a positive launching point, either through overplaying their own possession that leads to a clean breakdown turnover or through a kicking error that will give us a lineout inside their 10m line.
I’m not suggesting kicking the leather clean off the ball, by any means. We haven’t selected a team to that – all you need to do is look at the composition of the outside backs and halfbacks to realise that – but there is value in allowing Zebre to play you into the position you need to hurt them.
Stylistically, I think Zebre were looking to have a Cardiff like attacking structure under Bradley, where they would run through a fairly standard 1-3-3-1 shape on phase play with the #10 being the primary handler who links the primary structures together.
If you’ve watched Cardiff with Jarrod Evans running at #10, you’ll have an idea of what Zebre were trying to do under Bradley and, in all likelihood, will still be trying to do under Bergamaschi.
If you can read their 3-3-1 shape and their resets to their wide structure if you stuff them in the middle of the field, you can target their breakdown, force turnovers or pressure them into handling or kicking errors, which will allow you to pressure them at the set-piece. Kicking to them regularly – but almost always running back their kicks to us – will tempt them into overplaying because a 3-3-1 shape needs a lot of phases to generate the mismatches and misreads it thrives on.
There are scrum penalties here for us, maul penalties and opportunities to attack them on the first phase after the launch. If we can stay patient and execute, there are 40+ points out there for us.
