The games keep coming but Munster’s injury and absentee list aren’t getting any shorter.
It’s just The Way of Things at the moment but it’s rarely something that gets you any leeway. Munster currently have 33 players either injured, playing test rugby or otherwise absent.
In the second row alone, six of our seven senior locks are currently unavailable – five of those because of short to medium-term injuries.
At a certain point, there are only so many unavailabilities you can handle before it starts to affect results. In a way, it already has. In the first 7 games of the season, we’ve been unable to field a full-strength selection once because of injuries, the Emerging Ireland tour (from which two players came back injured) and now international call-ups. In the last few years, the Irish Rugby Bubble has become obsessed with this idea of Next Man Up to the point of mania where, regardless of the guys who are unavailable, you are expected to win as a matter of course.
The best example of this is young Leinster teams featuring hugely experienced internationals in every line of the team winning with a bonus point over heavily depleted Welsh sides. The media don’t really know who the younger Leinster players are or have any idea what a full-strength Scarlets side looks like anyway so they become the story, not the hugely experienced former internationals like Sean Cronin, James Tracey, Michael Bent, Ed Byrne, Devin Toner, Scott Fardy, Dave Kearney, Rhys Ruddock, Joe Tomane, etc, who helped to brace those wins like a stake does for a sapling.
Ideally, Munster would now do the same but, unfortunately, we do not have the luxury of selecting experienced vets and then dotting young talent around them at the moment. Injury has removed that option, certainly in the pack.
Instead, it’s young lads backing up younger lads for a must-win, can’t-afford-to-lose InterPro in Thomond Park. Backs to the walls, swords in the kids’ hands, enemies at the gates – it feels familiar.
Whatever happens, Munster is at the stage where we need results and points on the board. Any flavour of a win in Thomond Park and we should pop right back into the top 8 before the November break. If we back that up with a win over Connacht at the end of November, we can copperfasten that position and build from there.
But getting the win this weekend will be hugely challenging in the circumstances.
Lose, and we’re already at a point where we’re looking for table churn with a tonne of sides in that middle block of eight sides opening each other’s throats up to clear a path to the playoffs or a long unbeaten stretch through December and January to get us back into solid European contention.
Ulster Rugby: 15. Stewart Moore, 14. Ben Moxham, 13. James Hume, 12. Luke Marshall, 11. Ethan McIlroy, 10. Billy Burns, 9. Nathan Doak; 1. Andy Warwick, 2. Tom Stewart, 3. Marty Moore, 4. Alan O’Connor, 5. Sam Carter, 6. David McCann, 7. Sean Reffell, 8. Duane Vermeulen.
Replacements: 16. John Andrew, 17. Rory Sutherland, 18. Gareth Milasinovich, 19. Cormac Izuchukwu, 20. Jordi Murphy, 21. John Cooney, 22. Angus Curtis, 23. Craig Gilroy.
The key to beating Ulster lies in two key areas – management of your own position on the field and denying them lineout access to our 22.
When Ulster get a consistent field position in and around your 22, they are experts at pinning you in at the maul, dragging multiple penalties out of you and then scoring while also cheesing the clock for long periods. They are built to do just that. They have the best lineout in the competition, a fantastic maul that we’ll have to make tough decisions on when it comes to our lineout competing and usually they have the elite #10 channel pressure of Stuart McCloskey to create the kinds of gainline or compressions that kill you stone dead.
To do this, you’ve got to deny them that position in the first place and they usually obtain that through penalty access, which they usually obtain by rolling across your defensive system in the aftermath of a transition or off a lineout/scrum from further out the field. They will play the ball off #9, they will stay patient and they will buy a cheap offside penalty or trap you under their heavily latched tight five carries. Ulster model really well onto a big French side with their approach and pack build and you should approach them in the same manner. High-intensity stop and swipe defence – don’t get trapped! – and limit your breakdown entries to obvious windows to force Ulster into their kicking game, which they don’t like doing too loosely.
Ulster do kick the ball – they are quite conservative in their own half of the field and they’ll box kick mostly to keep their heavier front five build marching forward in small blocks of 20/30m – but they kick far less than Leinster, for example. They have added a “pressure kicking” option on their phase play inside Q3 off their midfield.
This is a good example of their general behaviour off the lineout outside the 22, their phase play and how their backline slide around outside of their tight forward line.
That’s a good kicking option from McCloskey but Marshall and Hume will be just as capable of finding that space if Ulster roll off the lineout like this.
Ulster’s narrow attack cuts down on errors and draws opposition forwards in to confront them. That creates natural lanes down the 15m trams.
So why are Ulster in the lower half of the table when it comes to kick volume and kick distance? We know the kick distance is down to preserving the energy of their tight five (and pack overall) but why is the kick volume low?
I think it’s because Ulster want to reduce the number of defensive sequences they have to endure. Some teams are comfortable defending for long sequences – Munster, for example – but Ulster voluntarily choose to reduce this through their kicking tendencies. Ulster have the 12th lowest amount of tackles made specifically because they kick so infrequently, relatively speaking.
Why?
Ulster’s set piece and offensive phase play pack build are heavy and very direct – they go forward. By the same token, that pack build is not designed to defend open space for long periods. Ulster’s pack attacks narrow but they also defend narrow.
The first example here illustrates how narrow their pack and front five defends – the second will show how, when they kick, it opens them up to more defensive movement.
The game Munster are trying to play is a bad matchup for this Ulster defence, especially one that might be at less than 100% coming into this game because of their issues with illness this past week. We will need to be very, very accurate with our possession and be brave enough to take Ulster through the phases, even in our own Q2.
If we can be brave, attack off the screen and exploit the compressions that Ulster have baked into their defensive structure, there are tries from long range for us here. We just have to go for them.
