Understanding how to propel Munster to the levels we aspire to be is actually a process of learning where we’re weak.
This isn’t about making sure that you have no weaknesses anywhere – that’s a misunderstanding of squad development – because there is no squad anywhere in the game, no matter how successful, that has no flaws. Your squad has to be perfectly tuned to play the game you need to play perfectly on both sides of the ball. That’s it. Completely rounding out a squad to play all forms of the game is an inefficient use of limited resources, even if it was possible and I genuinely think it isn’t.
At first glance, it would seem that it’s hard to fully work out what Munster needs because our current injury record is so horrific and disrupting when it comes to interconnecting units. Essentially, it’s hard to get a good look at our front row because we have so many locks injured and it’s hard to get a look at our back row for a lot of the same reasons. And if the pack isn’t running at full strength, how can we properly assess the outside backs?
This is what I hope to explore in this series on the Test Match Animal tier.
The first weakness that Munster needs to address is a lot of contract-spend tied up in bad contracts.
What is a bad contract? At a basic level, it’s a deal where you are paying A-grade money for a B-grade talent. It’s a deal that you might have signed when the player was an A-grade talent but, through no one’s fault except maybe Father Time, they are no longer at that level but their monthly wages say differently.
Munster has a few of those deals. The biggest budget killers at the moment are any deals signed pre-COVID-19 or any deal signed under heavy competition from outside the province.
Of the former, Munster currently have two deals signed pre-COVID-19 on the books; those belonging to Andrew Conway and Dave Kilcoyne. Three-year deals are something of a risk for any club, barring when they sign up a potentially generational young talent. Injury can make any contract look stupid, of course, but the main issue is performance and value. If you can imagine two lines on a graph, one representing Value to the Squad and the other representing Contract Spend, each individual player’s readout will look like two parallel lines that are almost right on top of each other in an ideal contract environment.
On the 5th of March 2020 – a few days before the first COVID lockdown – Dave Kilcoyne’s three-year deal was announced just a few months after he had some of the best performances of his career for Ireland in the leadup to the 2019 World Cup. He had just turned 31 a few months prior but was arguably at the peak of his career and would have signed a deal on very favourable terms because, at the time, Munster had no one anywhere close to him.
The bigger the ability gap between you and the second player in the depth chart, the higher your contract value. Dave Kilcoyne rightly cashed in at that point with a high-value contract that had a high-tier yearly wage but that value was also spread out over three years. Now, during the pandemic, all of the playing staff took temporary deferrals in payments ranging from 10-50% but those were not permanent cuts – they were/are in the process of being repaid post-pandemic.
Andrew Conway signed his deal in February 2020, a full month before the pandemic really kicked in and it was negotiated at the height of his value to Munster where he had more leverage than he ever had in his career to that point. He was firmly in the “We Can’t Lose This Guy” category for Van Graan post-World Cup and, to increase the pressure for Munster, he was negotiating in the cycle directly after Joey Carbery signed a bumper – and I mean bumper – early deal extension in early 2019 to take him up to 2022. Carbery had initially signed his deal in the summer of 2018/19 for two years but the first six months of his Munster career were so impressive that Munster wanted to lock him down long-term so he essentially signed a four-year deal at Munster inside his first six months on a significant, contract scale bursting wage bump at the end of that first season.
As with any contract, it’s never signed in a vacuum. When you bump a new player up to be one of the highest-paid non-central contract tier players in the country, other senior players and their agents take notice. Andrew Conway’s contract was signed on those terms as a high-performing, long-established senior player whose contract ended the season after a World Cup. Those are big “flight-risk” signs for a player who was 28/29 at the time of negotiation. By all accounts, he got close to what Carbery was on such was Munster’s need to keep him when (a) there was so much doubt over Keith Earls’ future with his central contract expiring at the end of 2020/21 – the following season and (b) how important he became to Van Graan’s Munster at the time.
Long story short, Van Graan could not afford to be seen to be losing an Irish player entering his career peak like Conway who’d been at Munster for seven years at that point, especially when it was so close to Carbery’s contract, directly in the aftermath of Snyman’s and De Allende’s signings and so early in the new “era” he’d planned with Larkham and Rowntree.
Van Graan’s Munster were solidly in Win Now mode from 2019/20 on and the contract spend increased accordingly.
In the aftermath of the failure to Win Now, there will be a natural shedding of the players signed and retained to achieve that.
Kilcoyne is a guy who might be able to show value as a veteran backup given the lack of a clear depth chart leader there at the moment but he’d need to drastically come down in contract value for it to be worth it to Munster. Conway is in broadly the same boat in that he’s got a hugely inflated contract relative to his squad value at the moment and we need to get it down or off the booms entirely. Conway’s usage has been dipping for Munster for the last three seasons – primarily because of international call-ups and, as of late, injuries – but those are two examples of high-tier “bad” contracts that are eating up Munster’s overall contract spending that could be used elsewhere.
Now, that has to be balanced with the IRFU’s demands for the provincial spending across the union to come down but these would appear to be two high-per-annum contracts that could achieve that in tandem with other cuts.
This is where the head coach needs to be quite judicial when it comes to his use of contracts. Munster are in a spot at the moment where we have a lot of young talent coming through out of the academy into their first year or two of being senior players.
It’s not out of the question that Edwin Edogbo and Ruadhan Quinn, for example, might progress to senior contracts this season – Quinn would be likely to go to a 1+2 academy year with a guaranteed two-year deal thereafter – but you can see why focusing at the entry points to the senior wage tiers makes more sense than keeping established talent come what may.
Thomas Ahern getting a two-year deal. Craig Casey signing a three-year deal. Calvin Nash signing a two-year deal. Josh Wycherley signing a two-year deal. Shane Daly signing a two-year deal. These are smart, obvious contracting decisions at this stage of the process when you consider Gavin Coombes and John Hodnett were signed up early in their contracts last season. The next guys to get on a deal would be Edogbo and Quinn, as I said, but primarily Jack Crowley as a core part of the time that Munster will be looking to Win Now with in a year or two.
There will be funding required to bump these players up and it’ll be there but I think tough decisions will have to be made with guys like Niall and Rory Scannell, Dave Kilcoyne, Andrew Conway, Jack O’Donoghue, Stephen Archer and other senior players. Not only do playing minutes have to be freed up but the contract space they inhabit could be used to retain young talent and bring in the three or four players I feel can push Munster onto the next level from next season.
The first of these three players is a Power Hooker, and I will look at the options on the market – both IQ and NIQ – in next week’s installment.
