Toulouse are better than us so they won this game.
That’s the reality. There aren’t many teams with Toulouse’s size, power and quality in this year’s European Cup. Some teams have one of the three, some teams have two of those but, for me, only Toulouse and La Rochelle have all three. Not every team that has size has power, and not every team with power has quality. Toulouse have all three.
We’re good – far better than I thought possible with the scale of the change we’ve been undergoing since July – but we’re not at their level just yet. Even with that being true, my prevailing feeling after this game was that we’re close, very close, and we’re getting closer.
This is a game that, ultimately, trades on wins and losses and in stark terms, we’ve lost all four of our games to Toulouse in the last three seasons. The last two games in this pool have been the closest like-for-like performances in terms of realistic, ultra-practical “is this duplicatable” performances. Last season, we burned ourselves to the ground to get a draw and, while we lost by five points in December and four points here, I think what we saw in both games scales up easier and translates across to other teams easier.
I don’t think we had to burn ourselves to the ground to play as we did here, essentially, and if we have another cut-off Toulouse this season, I think we’ve got other levels to go to. Will it be enough to beat them? We’ll see, but we’re building. something here – something real – and we’ve got the players right now to be a bad matchup for anyone.
***
The first 20 minutes of this game – the first 10 minutes in particular – were an illustration of all three of those traits on both sides of the ball to the point that it almost pushed Toulouse off-scheme.
As opening salvos went, this was like facing a barrage of artillery but even then, we’ll be disappointed that a few inaccuracies prevented us from achieving our early game aims if we ended up taking the kickoff i.e make them play, defend them, burn their calories for zero points and then go after them.
You can see the small little moments there that cost us. Against Toulouse, those small moments kill you but we knew our enemy here, that’s for sure. We backed ourselves to up the ball in play time and stuff their phase play down their throats. We almost got away with it but one slip, one step too far, one misread and Toulouse will hurt you.
What makes them different from other French super-heavyweight teams like, say Montpellier, Bordeaux or Toulon is that Toulouse have the individual brilliance and systemic functionality in their backline to take advantage of minute windows of space. Munster’s defensive work in that first 10 minutes was brave, muscular and almost perfectly managed. Almost. A little slip in maul defence, a misread at a ruck, a step too far on an edge press or on a pillar – they find a way to hurt you. This is where difference makers like Dupont and Ntamack change the game for Toulouse because they can find those spaces or if they can’t directly, they find the right player who can.
The challenge in playing this Toulouse side right now when they’re fresh is that they are difficult to wrangle from a cardio perspective. One of the core truths of this – or any other – team game is that the biggest X factor is the little power bar that goes down with every set piece and every phase of attack or defence that can bring the biggest teams down with a bang. Rugby is a game where Goliath beats David more often than not but, if you’ve got the right approach and the right tools, David can get him some too.
The old adage of “move the big pack around” isn’t really true anymore because Toulouse could essentially bring on a mostly new pack in the second half and they did that when they could afford to. Their #8 Roumat went first, to be replaced by Flament for a three-lock pack right after Munster took the lead. Neti replaced Baille at the same time. Meafou went ten minutes later. Only after Munster were reduced to 14 players for 10 minutes late in the game did Toulouse risk replacing Arnold and the outstanding Marchand.
A bit like a boss in a video game, you have to break Toulouse down in stages and we managed that in the middle block of 40 minutes from 20 minutes to 60 minutes but we couldn’t finish the job in the last quarter.
This is where a lack of depth really hurts you and hurts Munster in particular. We had to leave Beirne and Kleyn on for the full 80 minutes and that meant that neither man could really load manage all that much. That’s, essentially, thirteen forwards slugging it out with fourteen bigger forwards and that comes with a cost. This is where injuries come back to bite you against this Toulouse side.
***
You can’t expect to sit back and just defend Toulouse until they run out of steam. It just doesn’t work. You’ll get beaten up and, eventually, kick-pressured into submission regardless. They make it so that, if you’re trying to off-ball them, they end up off-balling you with their long kicking game. They were at it again here after their early period of possession and, as we spoke about before the game, kicked more than us and longer than us across the full 80 minutes. Toulouse kicked 33m per kick on average and that meant a bit of extra space for us on kick transition. Could we hurt them on transition like I spoke about in the Red Eye before the game in December?
This was the biggest challenge of our growing counter-transition game yet. So how did we do?
The best Munster try I’ve ever seen was scored on counter-transition away to Toulouse. What we are building is working. What we have been trying since July is starting to produce big scores on the big day.
Knowing what we know now about our work on transition, you can see the opportunities we created throughout and, even here, I think this long counter-transition sequence ends with a try for Mike Haley under the posts if he doesn’t get injured on the way through the gap.
There’s counter-transition kicking, there’s hitting the anchors, there are post-transition phases and then a massive opportunity at the end to slice Toulouse right up the middle.
Our attacking work here was actually pretty good once we soaked up some of the massive collisions that Toulouse threw at us early in the contest. We backed our skillset, backed our framework and it paid out for big time. Now, we were a little guilty of overplaying in the second half in our own half but that composure should and will come with more experience of games just like this one.
We needed just a little bit more depth and even one more tight five-forward to come off the bench as the game hit 60 minutes+. With that extra bit of power, I think we’re close enough to winning this game but the reality is that we lost.
In the black-and-white world of sports, that’s all that matters but if you’re not taking something hugely positive from this game you’re missing a whole world of colour.
We’re not where we need to be yet but we’re further along than I could ever have hoped.
Five Star Players
I had to grade this performance on a pretty hard curve. On most other days, I think we have three or four five-star guys but, to really drive home the quality of Jean Kleyn and John Hodnett in this game, I had to pull guys like Beirne, Coombes and Crowley back a little.
Jean Kleyn is something of a cult hero in Munster these days. For my money, he’s the best tighthead lock in the country and this game is another installation in my long-running theory that he would be a match-day 23 regular for any other team in the Six Nations, bar maybe France. Unfortunately, we have to endure a lot of nonsense about Jean Kleyn in this country where the cod artists of the week attempt to write him off with nonsensical criticism of “not being mobile” as if (a) that is something that matters to a tighthead lock or (b) applies to Kleyn anyway as he’s one of our highest usage forwards in phase play and the breakdown. This game should illustrate his value to anyone capable of understanding this game at a level higher than your average pundit. His scrummaging and defensive mauling alone would have been worth five stars but when you consider the absolute hammer-the-hammer job Kleyn pulled off on Emmanuel Meafou defensively for 60 minutes, you get why I had to separate him out on a curve of his own.
An outstanding performance. ★★★★★
John Hodnett is Wolverine. It’s the only explanation. The Rosscarbery man spent 65 minutes throwing himself into some of the biggest human beings you’ve ever seen in your life and looked like a lad who’d been out putting up fences for the afternoon.
He’s got the kind of leg drive that we used to see in David Wallace and he’s got a streak of steel running through him to the point that you could be anyone out there, Hodnett will chop you down all the same.
When you’re under 6’1″ in this game as a forward you’ve got to be good – very good – to make it and, luckily enough for Hodnett, he’s outstanding. At 24, Hodnett is looking like a guy with test capability and the kind of edge-forward usage that will be the way of the game going forward. He’s got the pace, power, and agility along with a seriously gritty defensive game to be a legend at this club and he’s already making his way down that road.
This performance against this Toulouse pack for 65 minutes seriously impressed me with his output on both sides of the ball and at the breakdown, with only one ineffective entry across the entire game. Teak tough. ★★★★★
| Names | Rating |
|---|---|
| Dave Kilcoyne | ★★★★ |
| Niall Scannell | ★★★★ |
| John Ryan | ★★★★ |
| Tadhg Beirne | ★★★★ |
| Jean Kleyn | ★★★★★ |
| Peter O'Mahony | ★★★★ |
| John Hodnett | ★★★★★ |
| Gavin Coombes | ★★★★★ |
| Craig Casey | ★★★★ |
| Joey Carbery | ★★★★ |
| Shane Daly | ★★★★ |
| Jack Crowley | ★★★★ |
| Antoine Frisch | ★★★★ |
| Calvin Nash | ★★★★ |
| Mike Haley | N/A |
| Diarmuid Barron | ★★★ |
| Josh Wycherley | ★★★ |
| Roman Salanoa | ★★★ |
| Jack O'Sullivan | DNP |
| Alex Kendellen | ★★★ |
| Conor Murray | ★★★ |
| Ben Healy | ★★★ |
| Malakai Fekitoa | ★★★★ |
