We use doublespeak in rugby almost constantly. Sometimes it’s even triple-speak.

Like, if I say to a forward that I need them to be accurate and clinical at the breakdown, what I actually mean is for them to fucking kill any fella they see hanging around the ball looking like he’s poaching. But I also mean to, like, not literally kill them. At the very highest level of the game, when people talk about being clinical, accurate and zoned in on their detail, this is the line they walk because when the elite get elite in rugby, we’re actually talking about Blunt Force Trauma. But not really. We’re talking about killing guys. But not really. You know yourself.

If there’s one video that explains that duality, it’s this one;

Scott Quinnell is talking about looking at guys and wanting to kill them. Should we send the police around to his house? No, because we understand that he doesn’t really mean it literally. He means that he’s looking at them like he wants to kill them, and he does, but not really. When you’re doing drills with younger players, it’s good to use spicy language like this to really set something in stone for them. Stuff like “when you’re running onto this pass, I want you to run like you’re trying to fuck [the defender] up, like you fucking hate him”. Now you talk about footwork and gait and holding the ball and shoulder deception and all that too but, fundamentally, all of this has to be done with murderous intent. There’s that triple-speak again.

It’s all linked, though. It’s hard to run hard with murderous intent if you are readjusting onto the ball or if you’re convinced that you can run as hard as you like, it’s the defender that has you rather than the other way around, and everything becomes infinitely more difficult.

Against Leinster on Saturday, Munster were running elements of the attacking framework that we’ve seen all season long to varying levels of success but, as we have seen when it comes to elite teams over the last few years, it began to fall down in key areas of performance as Leinster adapted and measured the impact. When you know what the opposition has for you physically and you know that you’re comfortable with that, defending is easier.
Much easier. Here’s a good example;

There’s more going on here than it seems on the face of it. This is an isolation play that Munster have deliberately forced to expose Ross Byrne at the edge of Leinster’s phase defence, where he defends quite regularly. Everything Munster have done during the transit of the ball is to force this picture. I’ve circled the Green is for Fucking Go target here and what Munster have done to force this isolation.

Wycherley, De Allende and Jenkins are all pinching under the transit of the ball – thrown by Farrell, who is himself a threat – and scragging inside defenders as they progress across the field to further expose that Go player.

Munster have four players on the outside waiting for the play to come off the hinge player in this sequence – Stephen Archer. What happens after Archer gets the ball is not predetermined but there are enough players there – Coombes, Cloete, Nash and Gallagher – to be able to work out the spacing should the ball get to that outside space.

The key to this sequence is Archer and his ability to impact the Go player and, as importantly, the guys defending outside him.

This seems like the wrong man in the core position at the wrong time. Instead of stepping in to protect Byrne from our tighthead prop, Ringrose backs Byrne to make the stop, even with Doris scrambling to make up a lot of ground on this particular scheme. Archer tries to offload the ball to the space but Ringrose is so comfortable he could just advance into the pocket for the easy intercept.

The scheme was good, the passing was sharp, it worked exactly as predicted and, despite defending it, Leinster still gave up the picture we wanted but we didn’t have the right man on ball in the position. This hammers home the need in 2022 for a big “middle five” that can run the middle stretch of your attack – the 3-2 or 3-3 as it’s currently used across the game – to force the compressions that every top attack runs on.

We had the scheme here, and the target to run after in the same way that Leinster did with Carbery all game off the set-piece launch, but not the right components to make it work.

If you swap Archer and Jenkins in that middle pod, the same problem applies because Doris has no reason to respect Archer as a ball-carrying option so he’s always going to swim across to protect Byrne, ensuring the same outcome. Archer can’t really run any harder in this scenario and, at this stage in his career, he’s not going to turn into an on-ball threat like Furlong or Tupou but, the reality is, the scheme demanded that he exerts the same gravity as those players on that phase for it to work effectively.

Over the previous phases, we were already setting about establishing the damage that could be done around Byrne whenever we managed to isolate him but you can see the roots of our problems there too. It’s not just about guys not winning collisions or exerting gravity, it’s about key playmakers making poor passes that cut off momentum by hitting inside shoulders or bailing out on the passes that need to be made.

Look at this sequence all the way through and watch for;

• Passes that hit the inside shoulder rather than running deep-lying carriers onto the ball by hitting the outside shoulder
• Watch how that forces them to step, chop and cut back inside

Take note of them.

If you are operating with a Middle Five that is mostly underpowered relative to their opposition when the levels go up, your passing needs to be quick from the base and aggressive off the first receiver, even with the risks that come attached to that. That’s the only way it works.

When you don’t have that against the very best you have packed defences, runners bailing out on hard lines and passers going for conservative options.

This sequence eventually leads to the one where Archer throws an offload to Garry Ringrose. From a schematic perspective and a literal ball movement perspective, we were not where we needed to be to really threaten Leinster from the earliest moments of the contest.

Exeter are not in the same league as Leinster offensively but they are big, physical men in defence and if we approach the attack like this, we will struggle in my opinion.