Lions 23 Munster 21

A blown four points and a failed tour

There are reasons for this loss - valid ones - but it is still a loss from a winning position that should not have been given up.

Match Importance

Match Quality

Standard of Opposition

Match Intensity

3.3

Altitude matters.

Before the game I had the temerity to write “For Munster, acclimatised as they are to the altitude at this stage, the key will be to stop the Lions from playing with the momentum, tempo and power that they are capable of, especially in Ellis Park.” The thin air in Ellis Park is still laughing at me for that one. In my defence, Munster felt they were acclimatised to the altitude at the weekly presser last week but maybe the thin air is chuckling at that too.

Munster technically lost this game when Jordan Hendrikse kicked a close-range penalty on 74 minutes to put the Lions 23-21 ahead but the game was actually lost in the 60th minute when Munster lost the ball after a brutally punishing 21 phases in the Lions 22.

There are a lot of slow resets and poor quality passes all the way through this sequence, which limited the passing options of the carrier so everything looked very direct when it didn’t need to be but what is most notable is how Munster’s breakdown and contact work degraded as the sequence progressed.

Have a look at the last three phases for a stark illustration of how inefficiency can cost you at altitude, especially deep in the game.

Right at the end of the sequence, you can actually see Alex Kendellen pulling up with what appears to be a cramp around Phase 16. Two phases later he was getting turned over but that doesn’t tell the full story either.

The cleanout crew of Kleyn, Hodnett and Fineen Wycherley still hadn’t reset into position after seven seconds, which is an eternity at the elite level. These are incredibly fit players – and Munster pride themselves on their fitness – so to see these guys not back on their feet after that long will give you an idea of how punishing this sequence was in isolation and how much it took out of Munster’s overall gas tank in the second half with no reward on the scoreboard.

When you’re playing at altitude against a bigger, heavier opposition who are well acclimatised to the conditions, you have to look at your overall team cardio as an energy bar, like you’re a fighter in a beat ’em up video game.

The more energy you expend, the more it costs you. Driving through 21 phases at sea level is something Munster would do without necessarily overthinking it. It would be what it needed to be until the score was found. At altitude, in punishing 24-degree heat with only a 9kph breeze, it becomes a game-killing inefficiency and it was an incredibly costly sequence in that context.

In the next seven minutes, Munster conceded a linebreak that should have been a try after a missed tackle off a lineout, an easy three points after we were blown off our own scrum possession for the first time all season and then a seven-point try after some tired looking screen ball work. When you’re gassed, your finesse work is the first thing to go.

John Hodnett looked like he was moving through waist-high water. A Munster scrum hasn’t gotten popped back like that all season long and Mike Haley is usually one of the best one on one defenders in the league but he looked like he was wearing lead boots.

Hodnett and Kendellen were taken off after the scrum penalty but you could tell most of the rest of the pack were redlining hard. That doesn’t just happen either, though. It comes from inefficient use of the ball. When we conceded that scrum penalty and the three points with it, I think we needed to be cheesing the clock for the rest of the game until we could get our bearings.

For me, that means airing out the ball with kicks, driving it low into the corners or on deep, high contestables to Liam Coombes – who I’d have brought on after the scrum penalty as opposed to when we went behind on the scoreboard on 73 minutes – with the idea that we’d go looking for lineouts. When you’ve got lineouts, you can have guys going down with cramps, for which they’d need treatment and you can also pick up a mystery neck and shoulder issues that need to be looked at in excruciating detail by the medic for two or maybe three minutes. All that gets you your lungs back while the clock is stopped or, if the ref is sloppy enough, maybe he gifts you an extra minute of the clock if he forgets to call time off.

Look at this scrum at 70 minutes. We concede a straight scrum penalty on it but I was shocked we scrummaged straight up the first time!

We should have been pulling the piss with this. We should have been not happy with binds, we should be checking studs and scraping turf off them like we were about to do open heart surgery using them, we should be buying resets to burn two, three minutes and sure, we might have conceded the penalty anyway but we’d have stolen time from the Lions who were flying it.

But you look at the front row with a 22-year-old and two 21-year-olds in the academy and you realise that they aren’t seasoned enough to get that yet. These are the tricks of the trade you pick up with time. Never work on their clock, always your own and let the ref go and swivel if he’s going to break you off what you need to do, penalties be damned.

Altitude hits you, but it doesn’t just happen either. As I wrote earlier, it can be managed but it really does have to be managed. Throughout the game, we struggled to get distance on our exits through some kicking errors off #9 and #10, for example, which served to keep the Lions within range when we wanted to stress their handling and structures further up the field where we could pressure them more freely. When you don’t get quality exits at altitude, you bring the acclimatised team into the kind of range that you can easily hurt them.

It lead to the first Lions try, indirectly.

Note the time on the clock there too – 30 minutes in – so you’re more likely to be feeling the heat and the height deeper into the first half so you’re more likely to make skill errors while fatigued and lose collisions. Nash’s tackle on Van Der Merwe is more to do with his body on the wrong side of the collision than an altitude thing but the isolation on the edge comes from over chasing the first two rucks off the lineout under breakdown pressure.

When you make mistakes with your energy bar at altitude, it will hurt you in the end. Every time you carry the ball, you’ve got to be aware of what it costs you on your gas tank.

The killer try that put the Lions back in range of getting the win inside the last 15 minutes is a good example of that decision making.

We have two young creative players – Healy and Crowley – who are out there looking to nab the win and the bonus point with an eight-point cushion. Young guys generally want to go out there and DO. It’s one of their great strengths but in this scenario, any on-ball involvements with your ever more inexperienced pack red-lining is a way more high-risk play than it would normally be.

Any scrum after a knock-on is more than likely a Lions penalty so this is actually an extremely low-percentage success strategy, especially when you need a tight five forward who’s doing his second 80-minute game a week in a row to hit a really deep screen pass. When you’re tired – all together now – you’re more likely to make fine skill errors and that’s exactly what happened.

From there, with 10 minutes left, we had very little left. The restart after the try went short, for some reason, because we wanted to compete when it should have been lobbed deep into the Lions 22. We conceded a scrum, lost a penalty on that scrum, Hendrikse booted the ball to the edge of the 22 and we were back under pressure.

We competed well at that lineout but were struggling to contain the Lions in the phases after. A miscommunication from Eoin O’Connor, playing his third ever senior game, left the fringe of the ruck open, the Lions broke through for a massive gainline win and Kleyn conceded a penalty on the next phase.

When Hendrikse stood over that penalty, you just knew it was over. We were out of gas. Off the restart, what did the Lions do? They kicked long and started cheesing the clock while we flopped into contact, legs and lungs gone.

Despite all this, we played really well in patches of the first half and even managed this worldie right on the stroke of half-time. How did we manage that so late into the half at altitude? We had a 3 minute 35 second rest between the ball stopping and the scrum launching proper, with a reset in between.

It all counts at altitude. With better efficiency and clearer thinking, I think we leave South Africa with 10 points instead of two. In that regard, this tour can only be viewed as a failure. When Munster look at a series where we lose both games from positions where we should have won, that will be the end of what we have here. So while the performances were encouraging in places, the losing streak needs to stop now – and soon.

The biggest takeaway for me is that this will be a massive learning experience for our young halfbacks and a real seasoning treatment for our young forwards who gave as good as they got for 60 minutes before the heat, the thin air and the gigantic men of the Lions took their toll.

It’s a short turnaround between here and the next game against Benetton, where we need five points and no bones about it, but with the altitude training – plus a light dose of getting stuck in some of the biggest human beings you’ll see anywhere – in the bank plus some needed reinforcements from the Team Of Us crew, there’s no reason why the two-game losing streak can’t be snapped.

The Wally Ratings: Lions (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.