Bulls 29 Munster 24

A game that no right being as close as it was.

A game of two halves? Well, every game of rugby is like that, really, when you think about it, but this game was the perfect expression of the metaphor. Munster lost the first half 26-3 and won the second 21-3 in a game dominated by the referee's whistle and altitude.

Match Importance

Match Quality

Match Intensity

Standard of Opposition

3.8

A close one.

This Munster team have guts, that’s for sure.

You can argue about top-end power, you can argue about elements of depth and quality in some positions, but one thing you can’t argue is that this Munster side, packed with young lads as it was by the end, lack bottle. Teams without bottle who find themselves kicking off after 34 minutes at 26-3 down in a game where they’re losing collisions, getting very little off the referee and playing away from home at altitude find a reason to jack it in.

Not Munster.

Don’t get me wrong, this was still a loss and the quality of Munster’s performance in the first half needs to be looked at – and it will – but in the context of the game itself, coming from 23 points down to earn a losing bonus point is not something to be scoffed at, especially when it’s guys like Alex Kendellen and John Hodnett leading the fight back.

♛ ♛ ♛

Before the game, I spoke about how Munster needed to keep the Bulls at arm’s length, so to speak. They wanted to smash us on both sides of the ball so we needed to play low and technical in defence while playing with a lot of verticality in attack. On the defensive side, the key for Munster would be matching the Bulls in the close-quarter exchanges where possible but, essentially, hanging in there once they were able to build momentum on a fast, hard track but the biggest thing to turn the Bulls game plan back on them would be to get our defensive breakdown game – poaching – onto the board in combination with strong, low tackling and solid work at the scrum and maul.

But for that to work, you need to get the calls and Munster didn’t.

I’m not having a cut off Whitehouse here because it’s a tough game to referee but Munster just weren’t able to adjust to the interpretations they were getting from him. If you’re Jack O’Donoghue you might well ask if this is a good steal, then why weren’t some of the above? You can feel hard done by, but that’s the game and without referees, we don’t have one. These days usually even themselves out across the season.

Without that ability to stop the Bulls on the floor, Munster were forced to scramble to reach wider contact points and the Bulls scored two tries and won a lot of kickable penalties off that concept.

We weren’t helped by a poor day at the lineout with numerous over and underthrows that you’d expect for the first day of “live rounds” at altitude where the muscle memory at sea level and the overcompensation for that goes a long way to explaining those botches, as does some effective, explosive Bulls counter-launching.

The second half saw Munster kicking much better, for a start, but also being incredibly clinical off the back of some big penalty wins. When Alex Kendellen was hit high, Munster used that launch off the lineout to gain entry to the 22 and then, after a scrum and another penalty, Kendellen converted a close-range opportunity after good tap and charge work by Barron.

A big scrum penalty lead to another close-range penalty after the impressive Paddy Patterson turned on the afterburners off the bench and milked an offside penalty from Mapoe.

We lost the resulting close-range lineout after another underthrow – mixed with an excellent contest from Nortje – but the outstanding Damian De Allende was on hand to pick up a fortunate try that put Munster in range of a losing bonus point.

When Bismarck Du Plessis was sent off for this outrageously dangerous bit of play – and Hendricks cleanout attempt from the side is a yellow card on its own, in my opinion – Munster had a real opportunity to get something from what looked like a resounding defeat after 34 minutes.

Healy’s penalty got the length he needed to put Munster in range.

That set up a big finish with six minutes to play. Bizarrely, Munster should have won this game despite losing by 23 points at halftime. We blew multiple opportunities late in the game that we’ll kick ourselves for – genuinely – especially given how clinical we’d been off other opportunities during the second half.

But this kind of thing happens late in the game at altitude. You’re tired, you’re sore up, you’re not getting full breaths because there’s less oxygen – so you don’t see the passing windows, you don’t back your pass and small opportunities pass you by.

They’ll stick in the craw, let’s put it that way. When you look at them in the cold light of day, it seems like four points lost rather than one point gained, but that on its own is something for this young team to build on.

Ben Healy is 22, and the only players who have more minutes than him at #10 this season in Ireland are Billy Burns, Jack Carty and Ross Byrne, who are – essentially – the #1 guys at their province given that Sexton is primarily and Ireland and Leinster KO game player at this stage of his career. Healy’s fresh out of the academy but he’s out there learning on the job in the key position. It will pay off in time, as it will for Jack Crowley who’s racked up more minutes this season than highly rated guys like Harry Byrne up in Leinster.

So the loss will sting – and should sting – but I can’t complain too loudly about a losing bonus point that I would have taken before the game. The true measure of this tour’s success will come next week in Johannesburg against the Lions. A win – or a better – there and this losing bonus point becomes incredibly valuable.

Notable Players

I thought Chris Farrell and, later, Damian De Allende were the standout midfielders on the pitch. Farrell won collisions consistently and Damian De Allende’s world-class ability was evident the minute he ran onto the field.

Jean Kleyn, once again, was brutally effective and played a key part in stemming the “bleeding” so to speak when the Bulls were running rampant in the first half. Kleyn is a cornerstone player for this Munster pack and one of the best signings of the last decade without question.

John Hodnett had real, palpable impact when he came on and looks like a really dangerous attacking weapon already, and he’s only just turned 23.

That brings us to the star performer, and it’s the man the Bulls were trying to get off the field from the first half on. Alex Kendellen. This guy is good. Very good. And he only turned 21 last week.

Endless work rate, ball carrying effectiveness, bravery at the breakdown, comfortable passing and the kind of maturity that belies the fact that he only turned 21 years of age last week. This was an astonishingly impressive performance that isn’t just remarkable because Kendellen is still, technically, an academy player – it stands up because of the difficulty of the conditions, the size of the opposition and the focus they had on him. He just kept playing. Teams want to batter the best player on the field and Alex Kendellen is used to that.

He took a high shot that didn’t get the yellow it deserved? No bother, he just went and obliterated the next ruck before going up the field to score the try that started Munster on the comeback trail. He was still going right up until the 80th minute. Kendellen didn’t deserve to be on the losing side but I’ll tell you this – any team that has Alex Kendellen in their ranks for the next 10 years is going to win plenty of games because he is just that damn good. He’s as good as any young back row player I’ve seen since I’ve been doing this. Not just at Munster – anywhere. ★★★★★

The Wally Ratings: Bulls (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.