On the 20th of November 2017, Johann Van Graan arrived at Munster Rugby to replace Rassie Erasmus midway through the 2017/18 season. On the 19th of June 2022, his reign as Head Coach will come to an end, one way or the other, and could be essentially over on Friday night. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Van Graan era comes down to this series of knockout games, which is to say, essentially, that this fixture on Friday evening in Belfast will go a long way to defining Van Graan’s time at the province.
If Munster lose this game, I think it’s fair to say that this season and, indeed, Van Graan’s term will be judged as a failure. That is quite binary, very black and white and possibly a little unfair but that’s the way of professional sport for a club like Munster Rugby. The sheer scale of this club – its vast footprint, fanbase, and the expectation that comes with that – intimidates me, and I’m not even involved officially with the club. When you’re the Head Coach of Munster Rugby that pressure can be crushing like opening the door of a submarine for a stroll at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
When I was in the Aviva Stadium for that Toulouse game I just looked around at the stands full of 40k Munster fans who had travelled from all over Ireland and Europe to be there and thought to myself that the pressure that comes with coaching Munster must be hard to deal with.
Not every club can summon that type of support during the inflation and fuel crisis that we’re currently living through post-COVID. With that power comes responsibility. To win. To lift trophies. To not just talk about it or aspire to it – to do it.
In that regard, I think it’s also fair to say that Johann Van Graan has been both an unlucky coach and, until this week, the author of his own shortcomings as the main man in Munster.
Last weekend, Leinster took on La Rochelle with a full deck of their top players to select from. Win, lose or draw, Leinster would have no ifs, buts or maybes. Johann Van Graan has never – during his entire tenure – been able to select the team he would have drawn up at the start of the season for a knockout game. The closest he came was in 2018/19 when Munster got a half-fit Joey Carbery back for a losing effort against Leinster in the RDS in that year’s PRO14 semi-finals. Every other season has been beset with injuries at key times. Across his five seasons, Van Graan has been without Chris Farrell, Chris Cloete, Jean Kleyn, Conor Murray, Tadhg Beirne and RG Snyman for key periods of the season.
The Snyman injury saga was particularly brutal because he had the ability to be a “Will Skelton” like impact player for Munster but two serious knee injuries put paid to that idea in what would be Van Graan’s final two seasons.
That’s what I mean by “an unlucky coach”. I know the idea of Next Man Up is popular at the moment but it has its limits, as anyone involved in the game is acutely aware of. There are some individuals that you can’t replace and that you are a worse side without.
I think we’ve seen that Munster is a solid top-two/top-four side in the PRO14 without Snyman and a side that, until this year, was only beaten by the eventual champion in Europe. Snyman has been out for so long with knee injuries that it’s easy to dismiss what is a world-class calibre second-row and mark his impact down to “ah, sure what difference would he have made anyway?”
Ask yourself what do La Rochelle look like last weekend with Romain Sazy starting in the second row instead of Will Skelton if you want to get a picture of the impact a world-class calibre second-row can have. Do La Rochelle still win without Skelton? I think you know the answer to that question.
At the same time, Van Graan is still entirely dependent on the majority of the team that lost comprehensively to Saracens in Coventry in April 2019. Four of the six front-row forwards that day are due to feature against Ulster. Go back to when Saracens beat us in 2016/17 and three of the six front-rows are featuring against Ulster on Friday. If Dave Kilcoyne was fit, he’d be another front-rower from five years ago who’d be in the matchday squad for this game.
The wingers are the same, Conor Murray is still an ever-present starter for big games and the only true upward movement seems to happen when injury strikes. As much as Johann’s loyalty is to be commended, much of his tenure has been ending seasons talking about the same guys learning the same lessons year after year only to learn more lessons the season later after being selected en-masse again.
Van Graan would probably tell you that there were no younger props, for example, that were ready to promote from within and the IQ prop market is (a) pretty thin, (b) risky and (c) expensive, even for completely unproven talents with an Irish granny and a suitcase. He would also point to a number of occasions where he had a top-quality NIQ prop lined up ready to go only to be denied by David Nucifora to preserve the game time of what was then a third or fourth choice test prop.
He’d also say that he’s never really had the space to run a true transitionary season because he’d been expected to win and win now since Day One and that the big-money signings of De Allende and Snyman limited the scope of what he could attempt developmentally. Essentially, what’s the point of spending €1m a year on two world-class players when you’re throwing the young lads in everywhere else and possibly running the risk of exiting Europe early and finishing low enough in the PRO14/URC to hurt?
My counter-point to that would be that we’ve ended up doing all of those things anyway.
Sure, guys like Gavin Coombes, Craig Casey and, arguably Josh Wycherley and Alex Kendellen have broken through in the last two seasons to be starters but other positions have remained locked in more or less the same certainties of four years ago.
I mean, did anyone really expect Johann to start, say, Craig Casey in this game, for example? I certainly didn’t, even with Murray’s relatively poor performance two weeks ago, even just to change things up from what was the norm of the previous two big games. There is an orthodoxy about Van Graan’s selection patterns that means that there’s not a lot of upward mobility in the squad that doesn’t reflect what have been five barren years under Van Graan of lost semi-finals and finals. None of these players has even touched so much as a Rainbow Cup for Munster in that time but the same certainties on selection in multiple positions remain.
You can predict Leinster’s Cat A team down to the letter this season, sure, but that’s at the end of a sequence where Leinster have won a trophy in every single one of Van Graan’s seasons as Munster head coach. The Leinster side that won a Heineken Cup in 2018 is wildly different in core areas today. We should have radically more changes in our Category A squad than Leinster in that time, but the opposite is true. That falls at Johann Van Graan’s door because unpleasant realities always end up knocking at the head coach’s door. He’s tried his best to end Munster’s trophy drought for absolute certain. No one can accuse him of not giving everything he has to the club but, at times it’s felt like that episode of the Simpsons where Marge keeps sewing and resewing a pink suit she got on sale to make it look like she had more than one outfit for the benefit of her rich new friends.
Each iteration of the dress suit that Marge is forced into making represents a further evolution of the side from one season to the next, with more or less the same material underneath. As time goes by the sewing has to become more elaborate, the design more severe to distinguish it enough from the previous iteration and the dress eventually rips and tears under the strain. The design was different but the core material was still the same.
None of that means that we can’t win this game this Friday or win another away knockout game a week later or even win a final three weeks from now. It feels vanishingly unlikely to me today because, mainly, I’m still suffering from the hangover of watching the majority of the side selected here have a bonus point stuck on them by Leinster’s “trip to Wales during a test window” team two weeks ago, just as that Munster side were, apparently, suffering from the mental and emotional hangover of losing to Toulouse two weeks before that.
As has been the case for the last few seasons, Van Graan has backed the core of his senior side from his first two seasons at the club to produce for him when it matters most to Munster’s season. If they can get past a dangerous Ulster side, who knows what can happen as the URC draws to a close? All I know is that we are down to defining games one way or another. Three wins and Johann Van Graan signs off with a trophy and a changed reality. A trophy this season means we can look back at his time in charge through a prism of eventual success. A loss at any stage and we’re looking at another season ending in defeat, another year with no trophy and, more likely than not, most of the same players walking off the field disappointed for the fifth season in a row under Van Graan.
A legacy is at stake. Van Graan has backed them – repeatedly – now would be a good sequence of games to deliver on that faith.
Ulster Rugby: 15. Stewart Moore, 14. Rob Baloucoune, 13. James Hume, 12. Stuart McCloskey, 11. Ethan McIlroy, 10. Billy Burns, 9. John Cooney; 1. Andrew Warwick, 2. Rob Herring, 3. Tom O’Toole, 4. Alan O’Connor, 5. Iain Henderson (c), 6. Marcus Rea, 7. Nick Timoney, 8. Duane Vermeulen.
Replacements: 16. John Andrew, 17. Eric O’Sullivan, 18. Gareth Milasinovich, 19. Kieran Treadwell, 20. Matty Rea, 21. Nathan Doak, 22. Ian Madigan, 23. Ben Moxham.
Has much changed for Ulster since I last covered them in detail back in late April? No, not really. My large preamble above is mainly due to not having all that much new to say about Ulster for this game from an analytical perspective. They have a few guys back that were absent last time out but the same is true for us.
Selection wise, I’d say Ulster are slightly stronger than last time out but that’s mainly due to Burns starting at #10. You could argue that Ulster missing Lowry negates that but… we’ll see how it rolls during the game.
The biggest factor for me is how Munster approach the kicking game. Do we kick long like we did the last time with the idea that we can pin Ulster in between the 10m lines with defensive pressure and then mop up Burns’ and Cooney’s tactical kicking?
Without the transition threat of Lowry, that could be a viable strategy. You’d kick long to Ulster’s backfield and use Conway and Earls as the primary chasing unit to try to get hands-on the runner, yes, but mainly to shepherd what is likely to be Stewart Moore and Robert Baloucoune into our back row on defensive transition. You pressure that first transition ruck, draw Ulster out of shape and then wait for Cooney to box kick back. Ulster box kick at a rate similar to Munster and the back three we’ve selected should be capable of stacking up well with Ulster’s chasers. We identified a hinge in Ulster’s box kick in the last game but they’ve moved McCloskey away from that chase line in the games since.
Without Lowry in the backfield, more of Ulster’s relief kicking will have to be done by McIlroy and Moore so there’s value in driving long and forcing McIlroy into kicking – there are easy metres to be gained there if he can be stressed. Neither Moore or Baloucoune are naturally consistent kickers and I don’t think Ulster will want to rotate Burns out of their primary defensive line too often if they can avoid it.
In the Wally Ratings for the last game against Ulster, I wrote the following as a general approach to a kicking strategy that will work against Ulster.
Our overall kicking strategy looked to attack the same principles in Ulster’s first one or two phases after the transition. We wanted to kick long, meet them between the 10m lines and then;
- Stay out of all but the most obvious of breakdowns so you can…
- Fill the field, and encourage Ulster to kick
- Keep a drift and a place hitter on McCloskey that can slide beyond a compression if needs be
- Make your hits and stress Ulster’s offensive ruck recycle in the wider channels
We seem set up to approach this game in the same manner. De Allende will be hugely important as a wider defensive captain who can prevent Ulster from using McCloskey as a hammer to break out of our “transition jail” between the 10m lines with Cloete filling the same role as he would have done in the last game if not for injury – i.e. up the ruck pressure on Ulster in the mid-to-late game as they transition to their bench.
We will feel that the same looks that were there for us in late April will still be there on Friday night. With Coombes back in the side, I feel we have more of a threat off our lineout and scrum launches, which could be important in targeting Billy Burns, in particular, and McCloskey’s defensive coverage of that #10 channel.
If Munster can run at close to 100% at the lineout, I think we have the weaponry to hurt Ulster more than they can hurt us but that’s just a theory. If the rubber hits the road like it’s capable of, I think De Allende, Farrell, Kendellen and Coombes will have big games with the likes of Cloete, Jenkin and Ahern frustrating Ulster later in the game to see out a narrow win.
Let’s see how it goes. I genuinely believe that if this team approaches the game with the aggression and accuracy we’ve seen from them at times this season we will beat Ulster and possibly beat our semi-final opponents too. What was our prep like this week? How is our mindset? Will we be up for this in a way we weren’t two weeks ago?
You’ll know inside the first five minutes.
And just like that, I’m looking forward to it all over again.
