Whatever way you want to slice it, we’re 14th in the URC today after another InterPro loss this past weekend.
There are reasons for that, of course – excuses if you feel like being a pothole – but that is the reality. Every game that passes pushes us further away from Champions Cup rugby and complicates the mathematics we’ll need to make the top 8. It’s not just about what we have to do – win games, in short – but we’re also becoming more and more dependent on those around us slicing each other’s throats.
That is the consequence of a horrendous first block of league games. The worst accumulation of points after seven games in well over 20 years. Now we have had a worse run of league results in the middle block of 2015/16 and a desperate run of eight games to end 2012/13 where we lost to Scarlets away, Treviso away, drew with the Ospreys in Cork, beat Connacht, lost 51-25 to Glasgow, lost at home to Leinster, lost away to the Dragons and then managed to beat Zebre by the skin of our teeth over in Parma.
We finished sixth in the league that season, as we did in 2015/16 which was enough to earn Champions Cup qualification. That was a different time, though, and the URC today is a tougher league with better sides and just 18 regular-season games to earn your place for the following season.
This loss to Ulster is a damaging blow, there are no two ways about it, but the real damage was done at the start of the season away to Cardiff and the Dragons when most of the lads were building to play in those games since the first week of the preseason were lifted on a week’s notice. We had to adjust to then put minutes into the lads that we had to work with for the next three games. The other provinces lost players too, but not players as high up on our depth chart as the Bloemfontein 10 were. Leinster can handle losing Max Deegan, Scott Penny, Jamie Osbourne and Joe McCarthy because they can just bring in James Ryan, Josh Van Der Flier, Robbie Henshaw and Caelan Doris. We don’t have that calibre of player to bring in right now. When you take the likes of John Hodnett, Jack Crowley, Thomas Ahern and Antoine Frisch out of Munster, you’re taking more important players. Joey Carbery came into this Munster side with less confidence than I did when I was trying to ask a girl I liked if she wanted the shift when I was 15 in Trampz (the z is important) in Bandon.
Look, I know I’m whinging now – and I’m sorry – but these are the kind of fine margins behind-the-scenes things that turn narrow wins into losses, bonus point bankers into ah-well-a-win-is-a-win plamásing and losing bonus points into nothing at all.
Even then, with that context, 12 points from seven games is bottom-of-the-pile stuff and that’s where we find ourselves. We are three wins behind the pace of even finishing seventh at the moment and that has turned next month’s game against Connacht into a season-defining one. Facts are facts and the facts that are killing us at the moment are that we have 33 players unavailable, the lowest number of tries scored in the league and we have the worst lineout in the league. Until that changes, we will stay where we are.
We’ve got four weeks to get key players healthy, lift the vibes against South Africa and then win at home vs Connacht. If we can’t, this has the potential to be a long, long winter.
***
As I wrote in the Red Eye on Friday, the problem when you’re burned down to the bone with injuries and international call-ups is that it becomes impossible to put established quality alongside the young players who will naturally come in to replace the players called up to the Ireland squad.
The side that Ulster put out, for example, had a young hooker sandwiched in between Andy Warwick and Marty Moore, two consistent heavy-hitting props that fit Ulster’s system down to the ground. On the bench front row, they a British & Irish Lion, a hugely experienced club stalwart and a heavy hitting 130kg seven-year pro. In the back five, they had close to their starting locks at this point with Jordi Murphy and Duane Vermuelen balancing out the youth of David McCann. Billy Burns paired well with Nathan Doak, you had an all-test midfield duo in Hume and Marshall with a lot of reps alongside each other and, sure, an inexperienced back three but two highly experienced names as cover for the backs on the bench. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but in the pack in particular they had the kind of balance you’d look for mid-test window.
In Munster’s back five, our average age across all of the starters and replacements was 21 years of age and our average cap number was 32 with Jack O’Donoghue’s 170 caps doing the majority of the heavy lifting. If you exclude O’Donoghue, the average cap number was 10.
At 19, Edwin Edogbo was the experienced second row we had available to us with 5 caps. That will take a toll against a team like Ulster, regardless of how many times you try to strip away the context. Yes, the young players have been the standout performers for us this season but we need senior guys around them to get the best out of them and those players are (a) injured, (b) at Ireland camp or (c) not at the level we need.
That latter one is a problem but not a new one. Guys like Kilcoyne, Scannell off the bench, Fekitoa, Cronin, O’Donoghue and even Haley, at times, didn’t lead the fight for us. O’Donoghue Perhaps it’s expecting too much from them at this stage but they are who we had available. I thought John Ryan did well and Simon Zebo impacted off the bench but for the most part, it was the under-25s in the squad who looked like the guys driving the bus as well as cleaning the bus and servicing the bus.
We just need to get some veteran quality to guide them. Look at Ulster with Duane Vermuelen and Rory Sutherland – that’s quality. But even then their guys like Moore, Warwick, O’Connor, Murphy, Carter, Burns, Marshall and Hume are all seasoned system fits who know exactly what Dan McFarlands wants of them because they have survived the purges he has enacted over the last four seasons.
Look at Leinster with Ngatai, Kearney, Ross Byrne, Ed Byrne, Ross Moloney, Rhys Ruddock and Luke McGrath there in key positions to drive their young lads on away against Scarlets. Most of those guys arent’ elite-level talents, sure, either ever or anymore, but they are all serial winners. That counts when you’re playing away in Wales on a Friday night. Guys like that take banana skin games and turn them into drama-free bonus point vending machines.
What you don’t want is senior players coming off the bench, for example, and going early on a throw and then giving away a daft penalty right in front of the ref.
Munster had a 19-cap 22-year-old Jack Crowley driving nine-cap 23-year-old Paddy Patterson around the field. 22-year-old, four-cap Eoin O’Connor was looking across at 19-year-old five-cap Edwin Edogbo and hoping that zero-cap 18-year-old Evin O’Connell wouldn’t be needed too early but, just in case, we had 23-year-old 3 cap Cian Hurley to come on for us. If all was well, all of those players would be paired with a veteran or a high-performing sub-test level guy.
When you don’t have that, you get silly inexperienced mistakes. We had a gutful of those in the first half that ultimately cost us the game.
What did we want to avoid giving Ulster? Close-range lineout drive opportunities. What did we give them? Close-range lineout drive opportunities and worse, we defended them really poorly.
Their third try was defended a little better initially but it developed into a close-range defensive situation that we didn’t manage properly with our use of forwards and spacing.
Lots of what your seeing here is inexperience and players making do in off-role situations. We tried to match Ulster’s short front build with narrow pressure of our own but you could see players getting squeezed out of power positions. We had a double small forward and a combo-flanker back row build here and Alex Kendellen looked like the odd-man out at times at the heart of the maul defence in what would typically be Gavin Coombes’ defensive spot. Eoin O’Connor had a tough time getting his entries and decision-making right at the start of those counter-shoves and as they developed.
That will come with time and as he adds bulk onto his frame – he’s got leverage but not enough size for me right now. I think if he was more comfortable with our lineout scheme we might have started him in the back row but we’re so low on bodies in the second row we were caught between a rock and a hard place.
That inexperience shows up on both sides of the ball.
Eoin O’Connor has been playing AIL for Young Munster for the last two or three weekends. He’s come in this week ice cold for his first URC game of the season against a close enough to full-strength Ulster pack whose speciality is offensive and defensive lineout mauls when we’ve already got a badly misfiring lineout.
Anyone who tells you that relentless injuries to the back five should just mean Next Man Up and a completely interruption-free performance is codding you. But our lineout problems are the core issue with Munster’s performance at the moment. The lineout is the source of well over 50% of all tries scored in the elite game and probably closer to 80% in the levels below the elite. In this game, 100% of all the tries scored started at the lineout. Without a functioning lineout, it is impossible to win games. You can deal with a poor scrum – it will hurt you but it’ll only kill you one game in four, if I was to put an estimate on it. Without a lineout, you lose every time.
We have the lowest number of tries scored in the entire league. Why is that? Because we have the pound-for-pound worst lineout in the league. Go back to last season and look at the team with the lowest lineout completion and highest number of steals conceded – it’s Zebre. They had an 82% completion rate and conceded 44 steals in 18 games, an average of 2.4 steals per game.
They scored 32 tries in 18 rounds, an average of 1.7 tries per game.
We are trending worse than that this season.
In the first block of games, our lineout is running at 79% completion with 19 steals conceded in 7 games. We’re conceding 2.7 steals per game on average. At our current rate of scoring, we’re trending to score 33 tries this season which would see us finish bottom of the table, there or thereabouts.
Without a stable lineout platform, we will be doing well to finish inside the top 10, never mind qualifying for the Champions Cup. It’s the biggest issue we face this November without question. Our attack is looking pretty good, when you consider that we’ve got no reliable platform to launch off. Our breakdown problems have more or less stabilized to a decent level. Our turnover count is dipping considerably. But with a 79% completion rate at the lineout, all of that is for nothing.
Look at this example – it’s as simple as O’Donoghue blowing his lift on Edbogbo by being a footstep too far away to be able to sink deeper on the heavier jumper.
Eoin O’Connor is 22 and has played four pro games. Jack O’Donoghue has 170 games under his belt and was the captain. Something is not working here and sure, Andi Kyriacou is only in the job since the summer and hasn’t had a settled jumping and lifting core since day one but the pressure is firmly on him to get the lineout and maul sorted because if it’s not right by the end of November, the season could be cooked.
That’s the pressure of the top level. Until that’s fixed, nothing will be fixed.
The last 15 minutes are a study in frustration. Jack Crowley’s charge-down exit was a bad start off the restart. The bounce of a ball led to an unavoidable penalty concession by Crowley on the 5m line but some seriously gutsy close-range defence gave us a platform to steal the win. The pace of our delivery off #9 slowed down at the worst possible time.
We had been squeezing Ulster there in the second half but you can see how that hesitation played into Ulster’s defensive stand. Static carriers running into set defenders means the defence has the advantage. Vermuelen might be an untrained optometrist but he’s a world-class, World Cup-winning poacher in these tight moments.
Munster were close – incredibly so – but not close enough.
| Names | Rating |
|---|---|
| Dave Kilcoyne | ★★ |
| Diarmuid Barron | ★★★★ |
| John Ryan | ★★★ |
| Edwin Edogbo | ★★★★ |
| Eoin O'Connor | ★★★ |
| Jack O'Donoghue | ★★★ |
| John Hodnett | ★★★★ |
| Alex Kendellen | ★★ |
| Paddy Patterson | ★★★ |
| Jack Crowley | ★★★★ |
| Paddy Campbell | ★★★ |
| Rory Scannell | ★★ |
| Malakai Fekitoa | ★ |
| Shane Daly | ★★ |
| Mike Haley | ★★ |
| Niall Scannell | ★ |
| Josh Wycherley | ★★★ |
| Roman Salanoa | ★★★ |
| Evin O'Connell | DNP |
| Cian Hurley | ★★★ |
| Neil Cronin | ★★ |
| Ben Healy | DNP |
| Simon Zebo | ★★★ |
