This is a huge game, make no mistake about it.
A bonus point win coupled with a few results going to form elsewhere would see us into sixth in the URC by the time Sunday evening rolls around but, by the same measure, a loss would create a clear separation from the top eight and firmly root us to the foot of the Irish Shield.
Right now we’re one win from stabilising our league position and throwing a bucket of cold water over the “crisis” that seemed to be raging before the game against South Africa A in Páirc Uí Chaoimh. For Munster, the key is to take the vibes generated by that epic Thursday night in Cork and transfer it to a Saturday night in Thomond Park against a side that are close to a bogey side for us at this stage, despite only losing four times to Connacht since 2017/18.
It feels like more, doesn’t it? I think a lot of the hard feelings that have come from this fixture are rooted in the last six games being decided either incredibly late or by less than a score. The average margin of victory in the last six games has been just four points.
For me though, by far the worst part of this run of tight, niggly games is how passive and fragile we’ve looked in the Sportsground and in Thomond Park. We’ve looked just one mistake from crumpling, one lost dust-up from retreating into our shells so fast we get whiplash and one try concession away from losing complete control of the game regardless of how many points we’re ahead by.
I find it difficult to work out why that is. Some of it is the built-in fragility that became ever more apparent as Van Graan’s tenure moved to its endgame. Connacht would use guys like Aki, Daly, Delahunt, Oliver, Dillane and Buckley to rattle us early and we would duly be rattled for the duration, looking to the ref to bail us out while Connacht slapped us around with impunity.
We just wanted to “let our rugby do the talking” but Connacht – and Leinster, and a few other sides – realised that if you rattled us early, we’d start to short circuit, almost, and instead of letting our rugby do the talking, we would end up sitting there with dry mouth while Connacht laughed in our faces.
Emotionally, we just haven’t been where we needed to be and we’ve got exactly what we deserved – a scrappy win or a scrappy loss with nothing outside that. Even earlier this season we were displaying a lot of the same traits.
We went from winning a scrum penalty against the head in our own 22 to a scrappy lineout where we ended up losing 10m of ground before a dud kick lead to a Connacht scrum in between the Connacht 10m and 22 that we somehow conspired to concede a 50/22 on.
What happened from that 50/22? Connacht scored a maul try after we over-competed on the lineout, leaving them a big gap to maul into with some of the most passive maul defence you’ll ever see after the drop until Edogbo just about manages to hold up the try all on his own.
Niall Scannell didn’t defend this so much as the maul seemed to just “happen” to him. This isn’t about Niall Scannell, though, because he’s usually quite a bit better than that but, like a few others, Connacht just manage to take him off his game by just enough to count.
That has to change. There are many sides that Munster “owe one” to after the last few years and Connacht are chief amongst them.
Connacht Rugby: 15. John Porch, 14. Byron Ralston, 13. Tom Farrell, 12. Bundee Aki, 11. Alex Wootton, 10. Jack Carty (c), 9. Caolin Blade; 1. Denis Buckley, 2. Dave Heffernan, 3. Finlay Bealham, 4. Josh Murphy, 5. Gavin Thornbury, 6. Cian Prendergast, 7. Conor Oliver, 8. Jarrad Butler
Replacements: 16. Shane Delahunt, 17. Peter Dooley, 18. Jack Aungier, 19. Niall Murray, 20. Oisín Dowling, 21. Kieran Marmion, 22. Conor Fitzgerald, 23. Paul Boyle
I can’t have been the only one to notice that nine of the ten Emerging Ireland players that were missing for the game in the Sportsground have been recalled en-masse to the matchday squad with the only exception being the injured Tom Ahern. These young players were always going to be a core part of Munster’s season this year and they’ll get a chance to show their system suitability this weekend.
Even then, the actual build that we’ve gone for to start is incredibly interesting to me because, on the face of it, we’ve gone for a counter-transition loadout that also puts a tonne of focus on the opposition lineout inside the first 50 minutes.
Connacht are a counter-transition team and arguably the purest counter-transition team in the league at the moment when it comes to intent – but they aren’t doing it very well. They are fifth in the league for kicks by volume but have the most meters kicked out of all the sides in the league up until this round. Other sides kick more than Connacht, but nobody kicks longer than them. As you’d expect for a counter-transition team that kicks longer than everyone else, they have the highest number of lineouts in the URC so far – 113 – and a very serviceable 89% completion rate which you need as a team with a “longer” style of play like Connacht.
You will often see them kicking from positions like this with Carty finding space in behind even the most well-positioned of backfield defenders.
When you exit off the field here, Connacht have been really good at retaining possession and then feeding their scheme off the lineout/maul and that’s where their game has fallen down. Without Aki – who they will have this weekend – they have lacked penetration off the lineout and it’s required them to play with either a lot of first-phase complexity or a multi-phase sequence that has often let the defence back into the game. Their turnover rate – second highest in the league – goes some way to illustrating that but, one way or the other, they aren’t creating a tonne of clean breaks or beating defenders with the regularity that they would have last season.
Statistically, Connacht have the worst attack in the league. They have the lowest points scored and, interestingly, the second-lowest number of metres gained with the ball in hand.
Now, for a team that kicks as long as Connacht, you’d expect them to have a lot of the cheapest metres you can get – those ran up on long kick returns – but they don’t. Why is that? Well, defensively I think teams have made a calculation that it’s safer to get the ball off the field because Connacht win a lot of turnovers relative to the number of tackles they attempt and a lot of these come on transition. This is a classic counter-transition strategy. Even then, I think that Connacht are given the number of lineouts that they are by their opponents because they feel there’s a weakness in their schemes or their throwing roster that, bar a few isolated incidents, most have been unable to actualize.
Munster have selected our two most dangerous counter-jumpers to start the game with a view to attacking this, I feel and moved away from the dual playmaker system we were railroaded into because of injury and Emerging Ireland call-ups. Mike Haley is usually pretty solid handling most counter-transition range kicks and is a better-positioned defender than anyone in our squad. Is this enough to blunt Connacht’s counter-transition starter plays? Perhaps. But then I look at our starting back row and I see a Heavy Combo Flanker and two small forwards.
Kendellen (heavy wing-forward) and Hodnett (strike wing-forward) stack up really well with Connacht’s back row and give us the ability to, in theory, retain the ball more efficiently on the first two or three phases after transition that we know Connacht will give us through Carty. No player kicks more than him OR farther than him so we know that we’ll have those long run-ups to attack this Connacht transition defence and if Hodnett, in particular, can bring the viciousness we saw at the breakdown we saw against South Africa, we have a backline that can open Connacht up consistently and force them off scheme.
If we can do that – keep our ruck retention rate above 95% – and play a 1.3/1.4 PPC game while keeping Connacht’s lineout below 85% while keeping OUR lineout above that mark, we’ll win and should win well.
Let’s see how it plays out.
