Munster 64 Dragons 3

Exciting offensive work against a depleted opposition

The scoreboard might suggest that Dragons were muck here - and they were - but they were made to look it by a Munster side that tore them to pieces with a devastatingly effective pass-based offence.

Match Importance

Match Quality

Match Intensity

Quality of Opposition

2.6

Dominance

You don’t get any credit for putting away a team like the Dragons with a score as dominant as this. Winning 64-3 and scoring 10 tries on your way to doing so has a tendency to make a lot of on-lookers dismiss the result, as if the scoreline was so emphatic that there was nothing of value to be taken from it. I don’t think that’s true and I’ll explain why later.

From a number’s POV, this wasn’t Munster’s biggest ever win – that was a 65 point winning margin against the Southern Kings back in 2018/19 – but when you win this well, this comprehensively, it says a few things about the two teams involved.

The first thing it says is that the Dragons, depleted at they were because of test callups and only playing three games in three months, were desperately outclassed. They came into the game with a plan to play a kick heavy game – not booting the leather off the ball, but looking to create scrambles with short, diagonal kicks – to make up for their lack of cohesion but it didn’t work, bar some early territorial success. You could see the same cohesion issues in their lineout, too, as it misfired all day to gift more possession to Munster.

All that meant we had a lot of possession – 64% total with 59% in the first half and 68% in the second – so the question became this; what would we do with all that ball?

Well, for a start, tear the Dragons to pieces.

♛ ♛ ♛

There’s a live danger in games like this – and the first 10 minutes of both halves are an example of what I’m talking about – that you end up labouring to your win and your bonus point against weaker opposition. Those games are still a success, on paper at least, but they leave you unsatisfied with the maximum if that makes sense. We’ve all seen them. Two tries in each half, a few missed opportunities, the game-breaking up when replacements come on the field – it’s a familiar story.

That didn’t happen here. Instead, Munster were absolutely relentless for the full 80 minutes in a way that we haven’t seen a lot in the last few years. Some of that comes down to a very settled squad coming up against a side with less cohesion than the minis running around at halftime. Games like this often get tagged as opportunities to bring in a tonne of young lads and try out new combinations but what we saw here was the value in not mixing up a side playing well with a tonne of new players.

It seems that the last couple of rounds of fairly settled selections have been building to the coming South African tour and this game was a good example of what cohesion can bring you.

Passes were sticking, offloads were finding runners and our attacking work was looking like the right mix of instinctive, off the cuff play-it-as-you-see-it stuff with pre-schemed, pre-built shapes holding the entire thing together. You can play like that when you have players used to playing with each other to the point they can be comfortable throwing passes, blind offloads and going deep into attacking layers because they know, not think, that they are throwing to a space occupied by a Munster runner.

When you have that level of cohesion, you can perform as we saw here. A settled side plus good players – and we have a lot of those – and an intent to go out there and play on an evening built for slinging the ball around can create this kind of performance. Munster had a Pass Per Carry rating of 1.56 for this game which is one of the highest of the season. So far this year, the higher the PPC rating, the less effective we are but with the conditions we had here – and expect to have for the run-in – Munster looked like the side that had everyone talking about “evolution” earlier in the season before the winter and the Omicron Incident affected our cohesion and our ability to play with this level of tempo.

Going through individual tries one by one and drawing illustrations over what you can see with your own eyes is, to me, redundant. I’m interested in the bigger picture, the grand scheme that lead to this performance and the efficiency within it. Why was our attack so much more impressive in this game? Sure, point at Dragons’ lack of quality but we’ve played worst sides than them this season and not had the same results. I can’t even say that we beat them up with the ball in hand either. We were decent in our collision work but I wouldn’t say we monstered the Dragons off the ball in a way that would explain this level of dominance.

It actually hit me during the game that we weren’t battering Dragons in contact by any means but we were absolutely shredding them with our pass quality.

In the Red Eye and Blood & Thunder Podcast, I spoke about the opportunities that would arise from the mobility differential between the Dragons’ back row and their front five and we repeatedly went after that spacing in the aftermath of anything that saw them moving from a fixed position to a moving ruck point. We didn’t exploit that by battering them into submission, we did it by passing around them.

It was most visible in the phases after the lineout where we could lock the tight five into position and then force them to move to where we wanted them.

The build-up to the third try is a perfect example of this. Munster feinted a maul and then moved all the way across to the far 5m tram line. As expected, two of their flankers followed the transit of the ball and trapped by the gravity of the second ruck. That left Wainwright to cover the opposite flank but it also forced the Dragons pack to cover a lot of central space.

Here’s the picture we were dealing with.

Where is the space we want to attack here? It’s the edge of that line with Dragons’ lock and tighthead guarding way too much space for their size and lack of mobility.

The only way to effectively target this edge defender without chewing through the initial fringe defence is if the transit of the ball is quick enough to expose that defender on this phase. You could hit up off the first Munster pod but when you do that, you bring Wainwright in to cover Dragons’ #4 and the chance is gone. At this moment, on this phase, Wainwright has to be concerned with the possibility that Farrell and Cloete – two big ball carriers in the kind of space that they’ll be in if the ball goes directly to them – so he has to float in that wider space to cover.

So Munster have to beat the Dragons’ blitz by passing to the edge space directly but in such a way that Dragons can’t recover. Let’s have a look at how that happened with a few other examples thrown in;

I could have gone on and on with examples. Munster didn’t need to be massively dominant in the collisions – although we were, at times – because the quality of passing from our primary passers Casey, Coombes and Crowley – was of such a high standard. Craig Casey, in particular, was bordering on unplayable, such was the quality of his passing. I’m not just talking about being quick at the breakdown – lots of players are quick at the breakdown – but it’s the range, accuracy and literal speed of the ball out of his hands that made his performance here so good.

He turned quick ruck ball into the kind of undefendable possession that it’s meant to be and when you combine that with the incredible power passing of a guy like Gavin Coombes, you create the kind of space that you dream of playing with.

This was particularly effective against the Dragons because of their front five’s lack of mobility and the spacing opportunities that created to overload their back row and midfield defenders in the primary line. The exact same offensive scheme probably won’t be as effective against the bigger teams because they have size and weight in the front five, sure, but also the kind of elite power athletes that don’t give up as much defensive spacing as Dragons did here.

There is something to the idea that Munster’s use of Casey as a warp speed quick ball machine is something that can add real impact to our attacking game as the pitches harden up in April, May and June when trophies will, hopefully, be in range for Munster to try to win.

Nobody gets any trophies for walloping the Dragons by 60 odd points but the quality of this attacking performance hints at more to come in a way that goes beyond other wins of this scale over the last few years. If Munster just jogged through the Dragons or ran over three or four maul tries, that would be one thing but this… this felt different.

We’ll see just what kind of dawn it was – false or otherwise – in the months to come but for now, at least, it was great fun to watch and just the right kind of encouraging to send the crowd home marvelling at what they saw, even with context ringing loudly in their ears.

The Wally Ratings: Dragons (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.