Glasgow Warriors 13 Munster 11

Echoes of the Sportsground in a dour loss in Scotstoun

This wasn't good. The losing bonus point is welcome but this is a loss that will bring outside pressure back on the HPC after a lot of good work to put distance between that game and this one.

Match Quality

Match Intensity

Standard of Opposition

Match Importance

3.3

A losing bonus point is welcome but the performance had the hallmarks of the other defeats this season – rotated team, a wet night away from home, and more handling errors than you can shake a wet stick at.

In context, once the annoyance subsides you see this for what it was – a losing bonus point against a relatively stronger Glasgow selection away from home… that we still should have won. Here comes the annoyance again.

Breathe. Serenity. Let’s get through this, it’s a busy weekend.

Look, a lot of flak goes flying in the aftermath of a loss like this. Munster will be happy enough with the losing bonus point which, to be honest, I’d have taken before the game but we have to talk about why segments of this game looked so bad and why four very gettable points blew away on the Glasgow wind.

We’ve got a power problem at Munster.

It’s there all the time with Snyman, Jenkins and De Allende out injured but it’s particularly visible in games like this where we end up giving up a lot of size, relatively speaking, to the opposition in the front five in particular. Glasgow’s starting props were 6’3″ and 6’4″ respectively and both were well north of 120KG. If you go back through the last number of seasons, think back on the number of times you’ve seen opposition teams leave their heavier power guys in the pack on for the full 80 minutes? You see Leinster doing it with Porter and Kelleher in those IRFU protocoled interpros, you’ve seen Racing do it, you’ve seen Saracens do it. Why do they do it? Because we are weak, relatively speaking again, in the front five and most teams are well aware of this fact.

We just don’t have the heft that we want there, either in the front row or the second row at the moment. That won’t always be the way because we have short and medium-term options there, but it is what it is at the moment. This game is a good example of the principle that, without Snyman and Jenkins, we’re a middleweight team that wants to play like a heavyweight, but we just don’t have the bodies available to do so.

I’ve spoken about the front row quite a bit over the last few years but this game was a good example of the general principle that when we come up against sides that are bigger than us in the front five, our attacking efficiency drops dramatically.

And make no mistake, Glasgow were bigger than us in the front five. This doesn’t really show in defence, as we regularly manage to stymie all but the biggest, most elite packs regardless of who’s playing but you see it on the offensive side of the ball most clearly.

Glasgow finished this game with Oli Kebble and their two starting locks playing 80 minutes. When they brought 6’8″ Kirin McDonald, they used him in the back row as part of a three lock pack.

Why? Well, on a wet and stormy night, that size and heft helps you in the maul. Munster are a team that build radiating structures off the maul – like a lot of teams – but we’re particularly reliant on that phase of play as a key starter for us. Due to injury, we came into this game with only two senior second-row forwards available so that meant Kleyn and Wycherley would likely have to play the full 80 minutes, and they duly did. Look at that Munster back five that started the game – only Jean Kleyn is taller than 6’4″ and heavier than 115KG up against a Glasgow side with size, weight and test quality everywhere. That counts.

Scott Cummings, for example, has 20 Scottish caps, which is more test experience than all of our starting pack for this game put together.

Where does size and power matter on the offensive side of the ball? Well, in the maul, if you’ve got a size mismatch you’ll struggle to generate a consistent platform because you can’t protect your maul build.

That’s a small sample of where it hurts you. We did well enough in the scrum but you’ll struggle to win the kind of scrum penalties you want in the modern game without dominant forward movement and we don’t get that all that often. We did get a clear collapse on Simon Berghan here through Josh Wycherley but Glasgow replaced him immediately afterwards and the advantage was gone.

Again, this isn’t a killer issue in and of itself. Defensively, we handle size quite well. Even offensively, you can lose collisions and struggle to generate consistent quick ruck possession but if your pass quality is low, it’s impossible to play the kind of rugby that allows you to overtake bigger teams who might be more limited than you in other ways.

We had a Pass Per Carry ratio of 1.31 in this game so we were plainly looking to play ball even in the poor conditions. It wasn’t anything close to The Connacht Game™ that has become something of a painful touchstone to reference back to with regards to Munster playing overtly conservative rugby over the last few seasons. So what went wrong? We weren’t consistent enough in the maul to create a solid launching point, our lineout lifting wasn’t what it needed to be either, when we transitioned to phase play, we didn’t have enough collision winners or established carrying threats to compress a big Glasgow side and when we did manage to win collisions and generate quick ball our pass quality from Cronin and, at times, Healy wasn’t good enough.

Even with that, it was a desperately poor charge down that was the main difference between the sides on the night. Don’t take that statement to mean that Munster were hard done by – far from it. This game was an illustration of what Munster need to fix to move to the next level, even if it’s a heavily rotated test window game. We need tight power. Maybe it’s because I’ve just written the review for #FRAvIRE but this seems familiar. Munster can’t help that the two players signed to make a difference in games like this and at the higher end are injured at the moment – Snyman and Jenkins – but it highlights the need for development to guys like Josh Wycherley, James French, Roman Salanoa, Scott Buckley and Keynan Knox. Power takes time to develop, I get that, but until we get a better run of fitness for core signings and those younger front five forwards push on for more minutes, games like this will happen if nothing else changes.

Much of Munster’s maligned attacking game comes back to this fundamental issue. It can be disguised, at times, with guys having a hot streak of performance but if we want more reliable top-end results, top-end power has to be the focus. This isn’t news to anyone in the HPC, of course, because a guy like Jason Jenkins wasn’t signed accidentally. A 6’8″, 125KG power forward would have been handy, even off the bench, for this game but it is what it is.

That doesn’t let the halfbacks off the hook either. Cronin was pretty poor, in my opinion, and Healy seemed to get lost on phases a little as he had done earlier in the season. Neil Cronin is a good player but these kinds of performances pop up for him every now and then. Realistically, though, he’s our third choice scrumhalf so you have to take the rough with the smooth there. Healy is still incredibly young and raw and it’s easy to forget that he’s 22 and in the first full year of his first professional deal. In the same way that it would be churlish and futile to blame Crowley for not landing a difficult conversion in desperate weather, it would be equally churlish and futile to dump too much on the halfbacks either. There’s a reason Glasgow selected Weir to start this game, and there’s a reason why Leinster started Ross Byrne in their game against Edinburgh. Experience matters, especially in window games like this.

This game isn’t about Munster’s attack, or Van Graan – it’s about Munster needing to get power forwards out onto the pitch to help win the offensive collisions and offensive tight scenarios that we need to push on. Until we can do that, there will be sloggy games like this that will teeter on a knife-edge for longer than they should.

The Wally Ratings: Glasgow (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.