I’ve spent the last week watching back the majority of the 2021/22 season and one thing comes to mind. Déja Vu.

A crippling injury to RG Snyman early in the season? More key injuries during different spells of the season? Covid disruption? Off-field chaos? It all seems so familiar. Like we’ve done this before, somehow. The only “new” thing that we experienced was that Leinster didn’t end our season in Dublin which was refreshing in the same way that dislocating your shoulder might take your mind off a bad migraine.

This time last season I was talking about how Munster’s season – and prospects of success – would hinge on the following criteria;

Munster have the potential to snap the streak if and only if key tight five forwards remain relatively fit and available during the season.

We lost RG Snyman to another season-ending knee injury in October, Jason Jenkins only managed to make his debut (for 18 minutes) in December before getting injured again until late March and Tadhg Beirne has only played seven times for us all season long. He last played for Munster in January. Dave Kilcoyne – a key physical component for Munster even at 33 – managed nine games during the season but missed the entire run-in post-Six nations with a neck injury picked up at Ireland camp. He last played for Munster in February.

So, yes, Munster’s 2021/22 is a story of withering medium to long-term injuries to core players at the worst possible time but it’s not even close to the full story. You have to tell the injury story to be fully fair but, in reality, it’s been the story of the last five years so there’s only so much fairness to go around.

A far greater problem is a growing feeling that I can’t seem to shake, which is that a large group of the senior squad have become so accustomed to falling short on the big day that it no longer motivates them in a real sense pre-game. Why would it? Genuinely. It sounds like I’m sticking the boot in here but, realistically, how long can any group of senior players spend losing finals, semi-finals, quarter-finals and big, yardstick games against Leinster before it becomes easier to just accept it as the reality and that anything different is a bonus?

That’s just human nature. If you keep losing – especially to Leinster, against whom we are consistently judged – how long is it until it just becomes a formality? Everyone talks about making a statement and righting wrongs ahead of those big InterPro games but anything you say or do sounds a bit hollow when, regardless of what was said or done in the build-up, you lose. Over and over again.

People will tell you that you’ve got to go on a journey as a side when it comes to winning trophies and, to an extent, that’s true.

We talk about Munster going on a long journey to win the Heineken Cup in the 2000s, for example, but that wasn’t the same Munster team losing year on year. The team that lost in 2002 to Leicester, for example, was mostly overhauled – 8 different starters and five different replacements – by the time 2006 rolled around. By the time 2008 rolled around, there were another five different names on the starting teamsheet, with five different replacements compared to the 2006 final. Some players stayed the same throughout – O’Connell, Wallace, O’Gara, Hayes – but every other slot on the team was overhauled and kept fresh, even if the bench was used radically different in that era.

You either improved the side or you didn’t and that was re-assessed every year. If you did, you stayed on. If you didn’t, you were moved on fairly quickly. Anthony Foley, Peter Stringer and Shaun Payne were the proof of that in 2007/2008.

By way of comparison, the Munster of 2021/2022 is still mostly the same as the Munster of 2018/19. If not for injury, twelve of the side who lost 24-9 to Leinster on the 18th of May 2019 would have started against Ulster last week. You could argue that there would be five changes on the bench. Declan Kidney made more changes to his Category A side between 2006 and 2008 than Johann Van Graan has made in four full seasons at the club and, keep in mind, Kidney made those changes to a squad that had a Heineken Cup medal in their back pocket.

That “stagnation” of sorts has come to represent a lot of Van Graan’s era. I’m sure he would argue that, for the most part, he didn’t have a properly functioning academy to work with until at least 2019/20, given the colossal reset that had to happen at that level post-2015/16 and that he was kneecapped, to a certain extent, by the quality available to him throughout the layers of the squad for much of his tenure.

Even if that’s true – and it’s mostly true –  you still get the feeling that in the last three years in particular that a younger player in Munster has to play twice as well for twice as long as the current incumbent to get even half the opportunities the senior man gets by default. You could point to guys like Coombes, Casey, Barron, Hodnett, Healy, Ahern, Josh Wycherley and Kendellen getting consistent opportunities this season and last but you could equally ask how many times these players started a Category A game at the expense of an incumbent when that incumbent was fully fit and available.

The only one who has gotten to that level is Gavin Coombes and, maybe, John Hodnett. Everyone else has earned consistent minutes in big games during the absence of incumbents. Would Alex Kendellen have had the run in big games that he did without injuries to Hodnett, Cloete and Daly during the campaign? Would Josh Wycherley have had the end-of-season run he did without an injury to Dave Kilcoyne? Would Ahern have made it onto the bench for big games if Snyman and Beirne were fit? Even with Craig Casey – a capped international, let’s not forget – how many times has he started ahead of Conor Murray in big games this season when both were fit? The only one you could argue was the Ulster game post-Exeter where Casey played really well and then went back to a bench role for every game of consequence thereafter.

I ask this because the most energizing performances of the season – Scarlets and Wasps away – featured outstanding performances from guys like Liam Coombes, Daniel Okeke, Patrick Campbell, Eoin O’Connor and Scott Buckley. Those games ended up being more or less the only time we saw those players backed with selection in a meaningful way.

I say meaningful way because it wouldn’t be fair to say that they didn’t get minutes. Minutes have never been the problem, it’s making the minutes mean something. There has long been the feeling amongst younger players in Munster that the minutes they get are both (a) scheduled and (b) have no bearing on selection for big games unless someone gets injured.

In some ways, those scheduled minutes are often viewed the same way as playing AIL used to be seen, but with more depth chart jeopardy. When you played AIL in the years pre-Costello, you’d be expected to dominate so if you did, it was no big deal. You were supposed to, after all, so the only value as far as your Munster career was concerned was staying fit and building match sharpness. If you didn’t dominate, well that opens up a whole can of worms that could see you out of a contract when the next renewal came around because, after all, if you couldn’t stand out at AIL level, what hope did you have at URC level? On the balance of averages, it was nearly better not to play AIL, all things considered, even if that meant all you did was train.

However, in a fully professional environment where teamsheets for big games are nailed down weeks – if not months –  in advance, regular season URC “minutes” can often become a means by which you can only play yourself out of contention, not play yourself into contention. If you do well, it seems to be noted for some indeterminate point in the future while never really being anything close to impacting the team for the big day. When Craig Casey turned the game on its head against Cardiff in the last 20 minutes after a fairly lethargic 60 minutes from Conor Murray, did it change selection? No. In fact, it seemed to copper-fasten the idea that Casey is really good off the bench and should stay in that impact role, as opposed to changing minds as to who the guy playing 75% of the game should be.

Why should an away bonus-point win over Zebre or a narrow loss at altitude against the Lions with hugely rotated sides have more of an impact on selection for big games than abject humiliations against Leinster home and away?

In that environment, you’re probably better off playing AIL compared to URC regular season Category B/C games because they both have no impact on your prospects of getting selected for big games or moving up the depth chart unless someone gets hurt. This is how a lot of the squad feels about selection – that there is no real opportunity for progression purely on merit. I’m sure the coaches would then say that if guys aren’t performing in training then how can they be picked? It’s a chicken/egg situation. What came first? Training looking flat or the realisation that training didn’t matter outside of the weeks you’ve been booked to play?

Look at Leinster starting Joe McCarthy in a URC semi-final against the Bulls with Ross Molony fit and available, for example of a different way of approaching it. That’s a system where minutes in games during the season actually mean something and produce real opportunities for progression in big games. That shows all the young lads at Leinster that if they’re good enough, they’ll get backed in big games and they don’t need a queue of guys to get hurt to do it. Win or lose, it shows the squad what is possible.

The argument against that is, of course, “cohesion” which has been something of a watchword for Munster this season.

The Omicron Incident in South Africa stole it from us and we spent months trying to build it back.

At the time of the Wasps away game in December 2021, I completely understood the thought process behind rotating in the covid locked team for big European home games and interpros that followed – cohesion, right? – but how energizing would it have been if most of the lads who played well against Wasps were backed, even off the bench, in the weeks to come? Not just the week after, but in the months that followed? Sure, they were beaten up, but how about 10/20 minutes off the bench because they were the guys performing? How much would that have told the squad – the entire squad – that nobody was safe in their jersey. That would have said that, covid or not, big games or not, you’ve got to scrap to get back into this team.

Instead, it seemed that the Omicron Incident in South Africa threw our plans into disarray and exaggerated the effect of paint by numbers minutes, glass ceilings and “we just need to get through this” thinking.

In the aftermath of the defeat to Connacht, I wrote the following after a janky, dour, frustrating loss to one of the flakiest sides in the URC this season.

You get what you plan for.

We planned for a heavy, kick and grind game but didn’t select our heaviest pack. It’s like deciding to go for a hike but leaving your walking boots at home because it was your flip flop’s turn to be used that week. Sure, it’s doable but harder than it needs to be and you’ll probably end up quitting the hike halfway through.

Performances like this added to the feeling that we aren’t a team that selects “horses for courses” but, instead, a side that books game time weeks in advance regardless of performance levels. The Connacht game – coming in the aftermath of a postponed Leinster fixture in Thomond Park – seemed to be selected with an excel sheet drawn up in September in mind more so than Connacht. For the most part, performances in one game didn’t seem to have any impact on the team selection for the next game barring injury, especially when Category A fixtures rolled around.

At the time, my instinct was to let these week-to-week decisions play out before making a judgement on them. For me, you are judged when it comes to your output at the end of the season because that is where all of your decisions during the season play out for good or ill. It’s the only way to be fair, in my opinion. What can we say about this season except that, by any metric, it’s a regression on last season, which was another failure in and of itself?

Those are the hard facts when we strip away the ifs and buts. By far the biggest failing, in my opinion, was the bloodless performances that we seemed to regularly drop in the league, especially against InterPro opposition. Why is it that Connacht regularly come into games against us visibly more up for it than we are? How do Leinster bully us with the same relish the likes of La Rochelle bully them with in almost every single time we play home or away?

That lack of “dog” is something that has been a hallmark of the worst of the Van Graan era, especially in games against teams who know us. Leinster, in particular, seem to know us so well that they can go through the motions themselves and still have enough to slap us around because we are incapable of surprising them. Leinster are very good, yes, that’s for sure, but we have far too much respect for them.

Munster have only beaten Leinster twice since Van Graan took over midway through 2017/18 and that includes the Rainbow Cup win in the RDS, which feels a little like cheating. Thirteen games. Two wins. Eleven losses. Four knockout game defeats. An 8-point margin of defeat on average, home and away. How long can you talk about “taking learnings” and having “hard conversations” until it’s just words you say after you’ve clapped Leinster off the field again?

That phenomenon came to a head this season when Munster lost two important games against Leinster home and away. The home loss was bad but bad in context – Leinster had a tonne of their top guys playing and played a rotated bench selection that they launched early in the second half. No one would argue that Leinster isn’t a better side than Munster right now and that game showed why, to an extent, because it was practically a full Category A matchday squad selection minus a few injured players. Munster were slapless, bloodless and painfully blunt, don’t get me wrong, but it was against a Leinster side that still probably should have won on paper even if we weren’t all of those things.

The second loss on the last day of the regular season was one of the worst performances of the Van Graan era because it was our Category A team against a heavily rotated Leinster selection. What should have been seen as a mark of the disrespect that Leinster have for Munster as an organisation and the squad of players selected that should have motivated us even further instead seemed to spook us into as bad a display as you’ll ever see from this current group of players.

It was damning. It was embarrassing. It was shameful.

Anyone who tells you differently is trying to cod you into accepting that this is what Munster should be about.

Since that game, a part of me knew that the season was over. When Ulster swatted us off to our holidays – with James Hume adding insult to injury afterwards when he said, “we know from watching video reviews and doing our homework that we’re so much better than them” – it felt more like a relief than anything else because at least then it actually was over. Results had finally caught up to the vibes.

The season was far from all bad – 2021/22 had some of the best memories of my time doing this as a job and I mean that – but the ending to the campaign was so bad, so abject and such a distilled essence of the worst days of the previous four seasons that it overshadows almost everything else.

It feels like the real season – as far as Munster were concerned – ended six weeks ago in Dublin.

It probably would have been better for everyone if it had been. That shouldn’t be the way that it is if all was right in the club if we’re being honest. It was a quarter-final loss, not a last-minute defeat in a final. Sure, it was disappointing – heartbreaking even – but you’d swear we had four or five league titles in our back pocket over the last few years given how listlessly we approached the final two games of the season.

That the penalty shoot-out loss ended up being a wound that we couldn’t suture – let alone one that would become a useful scar as I wrote about post-game – is a reflection of the frailty that took hold of the senior squad from the top-down as the season wore on and, you could argue, has been there for a number of years.

I say “senior squad” because, for the most part, those highly tenured guys are the players that were doubled down on in the build-up to the Toulouse game and certainly in the aftermath as the league season fizzled out. They didn’t select themselves, of course, but when you are backed en-masse to secure a home run to the final and you lose without a bonus point to Leinster B, there’s nowhere to hide, especially if you’re our starting half-backs.

What makes it worst is that, after the Bulls beat Leinster, we’d be looking at a home final for our first trophy in 11 years if we’d have done what sides like Cardiff, Ulster (x2), the Sharks and the Stormers have done to similar lineups. That we couldn’t manage to do that with more or less the same side that drew with Toulouse is an indictment on those selected and those who selected them.

Sometimes it just comes down to one game.

♛ ♛ ♛

It’s hard to boil down Van Graan’s entire tenure at Munster Rugby into one article but we can measure stuff like his win rate, something Van Graan has brought up himself at different points during his time as head coach.

Of all Munster coaches to coach more than 50 games for the province, Van Graan rates third when it comes to raw win percentage.

• Declan Kidney – 69% win rate out of 164 games across two stints at the club
• Tony McGahan – 69% win rate out of 115 games
• Johann Van Graan – 67% win rate out of 125 games 
• Alan Gaffney – 66% win rate out of 61 games
• Rob Penney – 62% win rate out of 61 games
• Anthony Foley – 61% win rate out of 64 games.

If it wasn’t for a bad run of regular-season losses this season, Van Graan would probably have a 70%+ win rate but still be no closer to a trophy. On the whole, I think Johann Van Graan has done a decent job at the province given the circumstances around his hiring. He came in mid-season to replace two world-class coaches – highly experienced, inspirational, charismatic figures – and had to learn how to be a head coach on the job, so to speak.

I don’t doubt that the man himself would admit that he made some mistakes along the way. Personally, I think his relentless trust of the senior players who were in situ when he arrived was one of them, albeit that was probably one of his more understandable mistakes. This is a coach who creates deep bonds with his players and builds a lot of his coaching structure from there. It takes a lot to get into that circle of trust which, to people who want to get in there, can seem a lot like having to be twice as good to half the opportunities which in turn leads some players into thinking that there’s nothing they can realistically do for more meaningful game time at best and that he’s a liar shining them on, bullshitting them at worse.

Van Graan has come in for a whirlwind of criticism since he announced his impending departure just before Christmas. A lot of the early criticism was unfair and knee-jerk, in my opinion, but it was also criticism that he shouldn’t have been his alone. Every bit of valid heat that Johann Van Graan received since Christmas could equally be applied to his senior coach Stephen Larkham – the Munster equivalent to Stuart Lancaster.

In the aftermath of 2018/19, there was a real feeling around the IRFU that Van Graan needed an experienced head to help balance out his weaknesses. Munster’s attack was a constant point of criticism during Van Graan’s first one and a half seasons as head coach so, when Jones and Flannery chose not to renew their contracts at the end of that season, there was an obvious space to go for a heavyweight coach with an attack focus. Stephen Larkham, newly released from the Wallaby coaching set up by Michael Chieka after a falling out.

Larkham himself put it as follows;

“We have differences in attacking strategy and overall game philosophy. We couldn’t agree on these key points and it is in the best interest of the team that they receive clear and consistent messages from their coaches.”

It’s not often that a coach with very recent Tier 1 experience becomes available like this so when Munster went looking for a coach to be our Stuart Lancaster equivalent, Larkham seemed to fit the bill perfectly. We needed someone who could kickstart our attacking game, Larkham was a guy with head coach experience, an attack coach specialisation and very recent test level exposure who needed a big job and a bit of distance from Australia where he was left with nowhere to go while Chieka was still the head coach.

It made a tonne of sense. On paper at least.

I know that I made the mistake of conflating Stephen Larkham the player with Stephen Larkham the rugby coach during my initial assessment of his hiring. I was also a little too focused on his successful World Cup 2015 with Australia but not as focused on their worst run in 60 years during the 2018 test season where they lost nine games and only won four. My thoughts were that Michael Chieka was equally to blame for that bad run and there wasn’t a massive improvement after Larkham left. Australia finished at the quarter-final stage in 2019 – just like Ireland – so I was hopeful that Larkham, with a free reign to sculpt the attack as he saw fit, would be able to push us on.

A lot of the criticism that Van Graan in the three years since seemed to have the idea that he was somehow preventing Larkham from playing the way that he wanted. Literally nothing that I’ve seen points to that being even half true. From the first few days of his appointment, Larkham spoke about how his and Johann’s philosophy was “very similar” and their three years together do not suggest that there is much, if any, divergence in attacking philosophy between them both.

So what is our attacking philosophy? I’ve never really been able to nail it down, fully. I’ve mentioned Van Graan’s overwhelming strength as an analyst a few times on these pages because I think it’s the best way to understand what Munster have been trying to do on-field, at least in my opinion.

Back in January, I wrote the following about Munster’s style.

We are a chimaera. A hybrid of many qualities, without necessarily being a European leader in any of them bar, maybe, our defence. Van Graan understands the game deeply as an analyst. As a coach, I think that translates into a team that is usually incredibly prepared for the opposition’s strengths and quite set up to attack those. Munster’s kick-heavy approach against Leinster in the PRO14 semi-final of 2019/20 was laughed at post-game but was duplicated by Saracens to great success a week later.

If it seems like Munster fluctuate week to week depending on the opposition I think it’s because of this reactive, shape-shifting, intellectual quality that Van Graan has. It’s often easier to define Munster’s style by how we play certain opponents. We reflect their strengths with our approach more often than not. When it’s Peak Leinster or another “big” side that we give up a power differential to, we tend to kick a lot. When it’s a mid-level opponent we can do any number of things but we rarely play a mid-level opponent when it comes to knock out rugby so, really, what value is it?

I think we, for the most part, are a Mirror Team who know exactly how any given team might beat us on a given day and we’re very good at inverting that game on top of them. Against Connacht in the Sportsground from earlier this year, we knew they liked to kick long and burn teams out on counter-transitions so we didn’t give them any. We pared our game back completely to take away their poaching game, hurt them in defence and attack the breakdown and kicked tonnes of our possession back to them to almost choke them on the ball.

We needed the referee to reward us for this plan to work fully – as we so often do – and came away frustrated at decisions that didn’t go our way in a narrow enough loss. That story could easily be applied to a number of games over the last three years. Any team that plays as we do needs the referee to hand us opportunities so we can play our game. Work backwards – if we’re a team that likes to attack off the lineout and lineout maul, we need possession to do that so how do we earn that? We need penalties. How do we get penalties? By attacking the breakdown and squeezing teams off-ball with our high-energy, high-volume defensive system.

If we can’t win penalties like that – something that is completely reliant on refereeing interpretation – we can sometimes struggle to break teams down because we don’t really have a set kicking style that defines our game.

Munster were, unfairly I think, derided as a box-kicking team mid-way through the season off the back of our approach to the Castres and Connacht games but, if anything, we’ve changed our kicking strategy quite radically from that expectation. We don’t kick long, like Leinster, Glasgow or the Bulls, and we don’t kick as short (or as much) to retain the ball like Edinburgh (27% of their kicks were retained), Cardiff (25% of their kicks were retained) or the Dragons (18%).

In a way, we do a little bit of everything in that we retain 16% of our short, contestable box kicks – joint 5th highest in the league with Ulster and Zebre – but we don’t really lean on that as a core part of our game. Looking back at the season as I have, I think we either needed to double down on the box kicking or lean heavily on becoming a strong kick transition side. Instead, we seemed to try to do both, in an attempt to cover all the possible outcomes and we were no better for it because while we cut down on our box kicking overall, our transition work didn’t improve in kind.

That translates to Munster not really having a distinct approach to games, rather than a negative space approach that attempts to find purchase on the opposition’s weaknesses rather than dictates the game to the opposition. In practice, the opposition has to show us something so we can hurt them. When they leave the impetus up to us, we can really struggle to break teams down when the heat comes on.

Ultimately, when teams want to hurt us, they kick us the ball long and wait. They know that we don’t have the transition game to hurt them directly most of the time or the power during phase play to drive the ball up the field in our possession. If they keep their discipline and don’t get trapped by our pinning game at the ruck, we will then go to a mix and match kicking game that, more often than not, requires the referee to reward us at the breakdown post-kick transition because we don’t retain enough kicks to get the territory we need to squeeze teams consistently.

From the Aesthetics article, I also wrote the following;

If you look at our measurables during a season, we’re usually middle of the pack for linebreaks, offloads, metres gained, and kicking because of this chimaeric approach.

What was this season like? We finished middle of the pack with everything, just as we were back in January. We don’t kick as long as the run transition teams that try to burn out the opposition with a large volume of long reset kicks. We don’t kick as short or as often as the contestable kicking teams. We don’t rack up a huge number of metres on-ball – that’s a knock-on of our half-in-half kicking game and our generally poor work on kick transition – and we’re middle of the pack for offloads. Is it a surprise to learn that we’re in the bottom half of the league when it comes to clean breaks and defenders beaten? It shouldn’t, because it was the same story last season.

We actually wildly outperform our middling stats when it comes to scoring points and tries.

Some of that comes down to the fact that we’ve shown ourselves to be a generally good setpiece team. We have the best scrum in the tournament from a completion percentage, we concede the second least amount of scrum penalties out of everyone and the only thing you could hold against us is that we don’t have a scrum that wins a tonne of straight-arm penalties. The Ospreys, Sharks and Lions are the top three in that facet of the scrum, in that order believe it or not. I think we’re a dominant loosehead/tighthead prop away from having a murderously dominant scrum but for now, we have a rock-solid scrum against the vast majority of our opponents. That’s more than good enough, plus with Gavin Coombes starting, one of the best launchers off the back in the game today.

Our lineout work is quite good on the whole – if a little overly complex at times – but our ability to execute through the maul, in particular, degraded as the season wore on because our opponents worked out that we don’t really have any explosive threats off the back of the maul so they can over-shove with relative safety. If it felt like our maul got weaker as the season wore on, I think that has a lot to do with it. If the opposition isn’t worried about the hooker exploding off the back of the maul or around the maul, they can counter-shove with more freedom, stuff any breaks and everything

For a team coached by Stephen Larkham, having a maul that the opposition doesn’t rate limits almost everything you do. That isn’t an excuse, it’s just the nature of how coaches work. Everyone has their “thing” and for Larkham and Van Graan, it’s kicking smartly, set-piece focus – lineout in particular – and then executing off that platform. As our maul began to become less effective, more focus fell on Murray and Carbery in big games and that focus didn’t suit them.

I know for a fact that Leinster were never really worried about Damian De Allende’s possible impact on them – despite him being the exact player they would fear for the Springboks in an Irish context – because they believed that we were unable to use him in a way that would maximise his strengths. The same is true for Chris Farrell, who often finds himself miscast in a playmaking role when he should be a heavy edge line hitter with space to work in. Our attacking system rarely creates that kind of space, however, and our set-piece work often relies a little too much on the decoy rather than direct physical pressure.

Our biggest strength, by some distance, is that we’re an incredibly fit team that finishes games really strongly. We have a points differential of +83 across the last 20 minutes of games in the URC this season. That is incredibly physically demanding, first of all, and when you see this points differential you can see why we don’t kick as long as teams like Leinster, for example, because it has wildly different athletic demands. Because we do a little bit of everything – middle of the pack offensively, defensively and a blended kicking game while, at least up until the end of the season, also having a really good lineout and scrum – we should, in theory, be able to outlast almost everyone with the chimeric approach we usually employ. We cannot be defined offensively but, because we do everything well, we should be a bad matchup for everyone given our fitness. In theory, anyway. In reality, while we often rack up a lot of scores in the last 20 minutes, the damage done in the first 60 minutes has been a killer for us.

That comes down to individual errors, yes – we’ve shipped a few of those this season for sure – and a consistent trend of starting slow, but how much of it comes back to our overall approach, which we seem to have been building since at least year two of Larkham?

They are intertwined. If players are left with a feeling of uncertainty because there isn’t a whole lot of “our” game to wrap their head around without a compliant referee, you can be left with nowhere to go conceptually. When you combine that with a gigantic demand for cardiovascular fitness, a long season and, as I said, a feeling that a lot of the squad were not mentally where they should have been, and you can see how a season would taper out as it did.

Of course, in the background to all this was the impending departure of Van Graan, Larkham and Ferreira to be replaced by a multitude of new coaches – two from within, two from without with one more rumoured to be in the pipeline. As I’ve been over before, the reasons behind these moves were complicated. When the majority of the senior coaching group announces that they’re leaving halfway through the season, the results can be… unpredictable.

It would be nice to assume that everyone will just get on with the job. Everyone will say they are, certainly, but everything is thrown into doubt. Guys who were negotiating and signing contracts off the back of conversations with Van Graan in October and November found out in December that the deals and terms they signed on were now fluid. If Van Graan rated you enough to give you a two-year deal in November, for example, who’s to say that the next coach will rate you on the same terms in July? That can unsettle players and unsettled players are very quick to get distracted by every bump in the road. No one talks about this in meetings, of course, or to the press but when you sit back into the car and drive home after training it’s easy to start letting the mind wander to hardnosed business like what the hell you’re going to do next season if things don’t work out.

Keep in mind also that Bath were doing business in the months afterwards that Van Graan would have had to be involved in, some of it with Munster players currently under contract. The guys’ that Van Graan signed for Bath – Gallagher and Cloete – were always going to be leaving Munster anyway so it doesn’t matter who they joined but the perception amongst a lot of people that I spoke to was that Van Graan had to be double jobbing. That’s fine if you’re winning but when you start losing, it can be tough to be the man that has to talk the squad around.

Munster lost 47% of our games in the second half of the season.

Van Graan and Larkham’s long-flagged departures aren’t the only reason for that, of course, but they play a bigger factor than either would probably like to admit. Every loss after you announce you’re leaving makes the next one sting that little bit harder because, as the season progresses, it’s only natural to think “this guy won’t even be here in two months”. You might say that the new head coach is already in the same dressing room – Graham Rowntree – but he’s not the guy in charge until July, wasn’t appointed until mid-way through April and, until he’s actually in the head coach office, the focus always comes back on your head and senior coach to be the focal point. If both are perceived to have one leg out the door – one more than the other, to be fair – then the collective confidence in what they’re laying out for the squad can waver and when that goes, everything can slide off the table. 

In the end, it did just that.

I don’t think it was a fair ending to the season from Van Graan’s perspective as I think he – and Larkham – are better coaches than this season suggests. Larkham will be a success at the Brumbies, relative to what they can achieve in a Super Rugby environment dominated by New Zealand sides anyway and I fully expect Van Graan to turn Bath around in relatively short order.

I think both of them will be better head coaches after the time they put in here but, for a number of reasons, they ended up being less than an ideal fit. In some ways, they met their “doom” at Munster on the road they took to avoid it but that’s often the lot of a coach who doesn’t win a trophy during their time at a club that expects to win them.

♛ ♛ ♛

At the end of a season like this, it’s easy to forget the good moments. It might have been borne out of quite a serious situation but the week of the Wasps game in early December was one of the best weeks I’ve ever put down in this job bar none and the game itself was everything you could hope for.

The game against Toulouse was a magical experience even with the loss and some of the rugby we produced at times during the season was genuinely thrilling. The frustrating thing is that Munster gave us glimpses of what could be at multiple points during the season but they ended up being fleeting glimpses, here one weekend, gone the next.

Everyone talks about a need for change at Munster next season and I agree. The changes need to be both radical and understated. Even something as simple as wiping the slate clean for the majority of the squad will go a long way to driving what is clearly a talented bunch onto something better.

The top of the Munster Depth Chart in some positions needs a readjustment in my opinion, rather than a radical overhaul. I think we also need to address core elements of our game – not just our attack, but the entire ecosystem of how we play, how we train and how we condition ourselves for rugby in 2022. Do we need to be a side that goes 60/20 on our pack replacements? Do we need to get an hour out of our props, for example? Would we be better going with heavier units for 50/30? That kind of decision can only be made with a game plan that focuses on decisive attacking and kicking philosophies very early on.

What kind of team are we? Rowntree, Prendergast, Kyriacou and Leamy will have to decide that relatively quickly and build towards it. I genuinely believe that there is the core of an excellent team here and a lot of senior players that could easily transition into solid veteran roles in support of a younger, hungrier, more dynamic team. That means transition – real transition – but it doesn’t have to mean an unsuccessful season.

Time will tell if the new coaching group are willing to make the changes needed. If they are – and I already think they are – success will not be far away.

TRK Seasonal Awards 2021/22

TRK Senior Player of the Season 2021/22: Jean Kleyn
(Honourable mention: Craig Casey, Fineen Wycherley, Jack O’Donoghue, Gavin Coombes)

TRK Young Player of the Season 2021/22: Alex Kendellen
(Honourable mention: Scott Buckley, Josh Wycherley)

Breakout Moment of the Season 2021/22: Pat Campbell’s try against Wasps in Coventry.
(Honourable mention: Scott Buckley’s performance against Wasps in Coventry, Jack Crowley away to Castres, John Hodnett in his first game back after a layoff against Wasps)