Munster 31 Vodacom Bulls 17
” You’re never as good as they say you are and you’re never as bad as they say you are” – Anthony Foley
Losing Interpros shows you the pecking order in Ireland. Since January 2022, Munster have lost to Connacht twice, beat Ulster twice before losing to them in a playoff and then dropped two dud losses to Leinster at the end of last season. Whatever way you want to look at it, Munster are currently the worst province in Ireland just based on recent results. Connacht are below us in the URC, you might say. And to that, I’d say in reply that the title of the Current Worst Province in Ireland is between Connacht and Munster, and we haven’t beaten Connacht in 2022 so, by the power of Rugby Maths, you can work out why I think what I think.
Why do I bring this up this week? Because to know where you are, you’ve got to get your bearings. Once you have your bearings, you can start plotting your way back home.
For Munster, that “home” has to be winning trophies. In the last few seasons, we thought we were heading in the right direction but we weren’t. No one goes the wrong way on purpose of course, and you don’t know where you are until you stop walking, after all. At the end of last season, we were dead sure that we weren’t where we wanted to be and, since then, we’ve been trying to get our bearings. Over the last few weeks, we’ve been looking around for something familiar, but there was nothing we recognised. No landmarks. No stars we could pick out of the night sky to plot a way out.
On Saturday night in Thomond Park, we finally saw something we recognised.
Now we can start to find our way back home.
The relief on Graham Rowntree’s face after the game told a story all on its own. Being the coach of Munster Rugby while you’re losing games and playing badly is not a fun place to be. The pressure to win is immense. On the plus side, you see the people who badly want Munster to win every day when you go to the shop or stop off to pick up your kids. On the downside, when you’re not winning, you can almost feel those eyeballs. You walk into Dunnes on Ballysimon Road after training, you’ll see someone in Munster gear. They’ll recognise you, silently. When you’re on a string of losses you start to feel that pressure. On the other side of it, when Munster are winning there’s no better place to be in the game. You become a hero, then a legend, then a god. Just ask anyone on that 2000-2008 team or staff.
Being a winning Munster coach is one of the best jobs in the game. When you’re a losing Munster coach, it can feel like the weight of the world is on you.
When that weight comes on, you just need to find a crack somewhere in that weight and then the whole province will pile in behind you.
This win over the Vodacom Bulls during a Yellow Weather Alert late on Saturday night in Thomond Park isn’t a turning point all on its own but it is a palpable moment of relief because it’s a landmark. It’s a signpost. It’s telling us that we’re on the right track and to stay on it.
We know where we are. We know that what we’re doing can work.
We know that we have what it takes to beat big, physical teams.
We know where we need to go.
All of those things are just as valuable as the precious bonus point Munster picked up for the first time this season.
***
Munster should have won this game by 50-odd points.
We should have scored more, the Bulls less.
Both of the Bulls’ tries came off the back of scrappy Munster errors in backfield management off a high ball and in possession. Without them, we’d have probably added on a few more scores and saw out the game on their end of the field, as opposed to defending our goal line (successfully!) for 10 minutes. The Bulls are a good side but very little of what they do well meshed with Munster’s game on Saturday night and they were made to look worse than they are by the weather conditions and the size and power that Munster were finally able to (finally) select.
I suppose the biggest thing we’re all looking for is a “click”. We’re like the protagonists in a Predator movie desperately listening out for clicks at this stage. The good news is that the attacking framework we’ve been trying to build over the last few months finally caught gear at multiple points of this game but, in even better news, there was still enough jank to point to even more scope for improvement as the weeks go on.
We’ve seen flickers of those moments in the four games prior but this was the first full 80 minutes where we got a consistent look at what this system is like when it’s functioning, even if it didn’t function at 100% for 100% of the time.
The key to remember about what we’re trying to do is that it works better when you have oppressive size in the pack to increase your own margin for error.
The selection of Edogbo, Kleyn, Beirne, Coombes and O’Mahony is our biggest, heaviest back five that we can play right now without RG Snyman. For weeks, I’ve spoken about playing “undersized” against teams like Dragons and Zebre and how it causes struggles, even when the “class” should be different. If you come in small against the Bulls, they’ll brutalise you. When you play small, you have a lower margin for error. When you are knocking around the opposition pack a little, you have more room for the inaccuracy and seat-of-the-pants stuff that sometimes comes with playing at pace.
Have a look at this sequence here – a carry off #9 by the arrowhead pod and then a link pass to a wider three pod off #10 – which leads to a Munster penalty.
Pace, tempo, dominant collisions and a penalty presents itself. When it works, it looks simple. But it hasn’t been working consistently until now so it’s ✨new✨.
Look at the way our tight five rotate around in these narrow phases. Archer loops back around to offer himself as an inside pass option or late cleaner.
The hit-up from Edogbo has a powerful and efficient “inside barrel” line from Loughman with Beirne adding some oomph as a possible tip. Scannell is now looping around too instead of filing backwards to an easier-to-reach but off-role-wide position. Heavy runners in the middle of the structure.
Loughman and Edogbo work hard to get up off the deck to file into position for the next ruck after Coombes and Nash hit the O’Mahony collision hard.
We win the penalty for not rolling away but look at the heavy pod ready to roll off the ruck just in case. Heavy runners are kept in the place where they are most effective and less likely to get caught off role.
Look at the opportunity it gives Carbery to attack a compression off the screen too. He struggled in the early phases of the game to get his timing on these deep screen rolls – the playmaker has to attack from the inside shoulder of the pod runner to the outside shoulder of the outside runner at pace to make this work properly – but he grew into that as the game progressed because of the quality of our breakdown work and collision winning.
Have a look at this long sequence of phases here and look for our work at the breakdown. Look at the speed of most of the rucks as we progress across the field. I haven’t thrown in a tonne of yellow circles here so you can just see the phases breath.
Did you see how much better the breakdown was? And how that improves the flow of each phase? How it gives the playmaker on the screen lanes to attack?
As we grew in confidence, you could see the way our improved breakdown and high pace offence were starting to create lanes and blocked “corners” that Carbery and later Crowley could attack off the screen.
Look at what accurate running, an established collision game and proper size in the middle of the pitch gives your playmakers?
In this instance, Scannell probably blocked a direct Crowley attack off the screen with his line and a direct pass to Coombes about angle out but it ended up doing OK in the end. For me, we could have scored twice on this progression. I think a fully confident Joey Carbery has a pop off this compression here.
On the progression of the ball, you can see the value of that 3-3-1 structure as huge spacing opens up for Crowley but I think the Kill Shot pass to Coombes, who was just waiting to angle out and hit the open space was blocked by Scannell. No real fault here, as it was all moving at a high pace, but the bail-out ball to Fekitoa in the next layer was a decent outcome that put O’Mahony into space.
These are the moments that show what is possible in this system. It doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to create the environment that we need to make it work.
Here’s another example of a series of phases that should have lead to a try directly on phase play.
Two errors from Liam Coombes hurt that at the end but he’s working himself into the position that he needs to be in to make it work – I can’t fault that too hard.
So, yeah, it wasn’t perfect but it showcased what was possible for this group and, the best part is, after four weeks of poor performances to put sand in the blender on Monday morning, now they’ve got a win to copper-fasten the positives ahead of Leinster this weekend.
As I said, not a turning point yet but a signpost to show us the road that leads to where we want to go.
More of this, please.
Notable Players
This was a seriously good team performance for the most part.
The performance of Edwin Edogbo has brought him a lot of attention and rightly so. He’s got all the physical tools he needs at just 19 years of age, which is rare enough as it is, but his lineout detail and top-level instincts around the offensive ruck are really, really sharp. Sure, he’s still quite raw in some areas like his ball carrying but what we’re looking at here is the potential for Edogbo to fill the rarest of all lock builds – the Tighthead Lock Power Forward. At 19, years of age – he won’t be 20 until late December this year – that’s incredibly exciting. All he needs is patience, a bit of luck with injury and he will dominate his opponents – all of them – for years to come. An incredibly special talent.
For me, though, it was Jean Kleyn who deserves the most amount of praise from this game. A few years ago, I wrote that if Jean Kleyn was ever to leave Munster for the likes of Racing 92 or Toulon, all of a sudden you’d see his detractors realising what a player this guy is. Why? Because if he went to Racing or Toulon, he would have real size around him so he could focus his energy into being a Heavy Support Tighthead Lock and, when he can do that, he’s genuinely outstanding. For too long, Kleyn has been the sole “big man” in Munster packs. When you only have one true big man, you’ve actually got zero because the opposition can double-tackle them out of the game. When you put Edogbo alongside him – and later Ahern – Kleyn can thrive with other giants around him. This is the value of running with a three-lock pack against bigger opposition. It allows your actual big men to play bigger and with more freedom. Kleyn scrummaged hard on the tighthead side of the scrum, battered the Bulls defensively and hit rucks with the venom and authority that this system runs on.
Quality. ★★★★★
| Names | Rating |
|---|---|
| Jeremy Loughman | ★★★ |
| Niall Scannell | ★★★ |
| Stephen Archer | ★★★ |
| Edwin Edogbo | ★★★★ |
| Jean Kleyn | ★★★★★ |
| Tadhg Beirne | ★★★★ |
| Peter O'Mahony | ★★★★ |
| Gavin Coombes | ★★★★ |
| Craig Casey | ★★★★ |
| Joey Carbery | ★★★★ |
| Liam Coombes | ★★ |
| Dan Goggin | ★★★★ |
| Malakai Fekitoa | ★★★ |
| Calvin Nash | ★★★★ |
| Shane Daly | ★★★★ |
| Diarmuid Barron | ★★★★ |
| Dave Kilcoyne | ★★★ |
| Roman Salanoa | ★★★★ |
| Tom Ahern | ★★★★ |
| Jack O'Donoghue | N/A |
| Conor Murray | ★★ |
| Jack Crowley | ★★★★ |
| John Hodnett | ★★★★ |
