Two moments swung this game for Exeter in the second half.
- Exeter freshening up their front five between the 51st minute and 54th minute, right after Munster scored a bonus point try that should have sealed a massive, season-shifting away win.
- Craig Casey leaving the field in the 57th minute.
The first one is an illustration of the depth and quality issues we have in our front five. Exeter is in a deep reset at the moment but can still actually bring on test quality or proper size and power in their front row.
Exeter, transitioning as they are, were able to bring in actual positional replacements all in one go. We didn’t trust Clarke – we wouldn’t have trusted Buckley either – so Barron had to play the full 80. We didn’t want to risk Josh Wycherley until the last fifteen minutes because Loughman was doing a vital job for us in the scrum and the tight for 65 minutes. Did we feel that Wycherley would be unable to do that in a tight game? The only player in the front five that we were comfortable bringing on was Jager, who only recovered from a leg injury late in the week. We brought on Gleeson and Kendellen on with 12 and 9 minutes left respectively. We didn’t have any locks to give Gavin Coombes or Tadhg Beirne a break, so they had to do 80 minutes too.
Why do we look tired at the end of games these last few weeks? There’s your answer. People go looking for all manner of voodoo and S&C mumbo jumbo to explain it but there it is. Power is oxygen.
We don’t have elite tight five power to rotate in and the guys we are bringing in are either teenagers who will be top players but can’t fairly be expected to be that now, or guys who, for all the will in the world, aren’t test quality.
Exeter don’t have that either but they can bring on Jack Dunne – 6’8″ and 120kg – and sure, he got lucky with two of the worst bounces I’ve ever seen on a rugby field at any level but having that size to bring on is valuable.
This is our depth being exposed. Our lack of depth comes down to a raft of injuries in the pack, it comes down to a squad in transition while also having the expectation that comes with a trophy in the back pocket, and it comes down to core areas of the squad being in deep need of refreshment.
Has a team with expectations of contesting deep into the European Cup ever had a front-five depth chart as ravaged as this? Some of it is bad luck with injury. Scannell, Salanoa, Kleyn, Snyman and Edogbo being in the match day squad probably win us this game. But some of it is down to positions where we probably should have signed someone – or, more accurately, been allowed to sign someone – to give younger players some developmental breathing room.
But that’s for another day.
We are currently doing the rugby equivalent of trying to climb a mountain with half an oxygen tank and no spares in our backpack. So when we’re choking out there, know that it’s as much physical reality as opposed to metaphorically blowing it.
The dog days of winter are when you miss Jean Kleyn, RG Snyman and Edwin Edogbo the most. When you are making do with guys who can fit the roleset in an approximate sense or who thrive when power is around them, you don’t get the same results.
We can’t untangle this reality from the result.
We also can’t untangle the lack of quality and composure in the last 20 minutes that ultimately gifted Exeter a comeback. Their first try was infinitely manageable from a positional sense, but we just couldn’t get out of our own way.
When we’re up against a mostly fresh front five while we’ve only replaced one of ours, do we need to be defending these kinds of sequences around our 22? No. Was that avoidable? Yes.
Their next try right from the restart was just… horrific luck.
That’s a nothing kick from Townsend. He’s hoping for a nice bounce to get a 50/22 but Nash would have had that covered on the drop back. What he couldn’t cover was a one-in-50 pair of bounces that went backwards on the first, and for the second bounce to then (a) drop short and (b) bounce up at his left shoulder. Horrific. The ball was impossible to catch on the first instance and then the dropping trajectory of the ball made the only option on the second a dive that, if you fumble or miss, it’s a try. You just have to chalk that one to the game.
The game was still there to be won, though, and we’d demonstrated earlier in the game that we could cut the Chiefs open over and over again. But as the game progressed into the 60s and 70s, it became clear that our blitz-breaking attack was now fatally altered and, with it, our ability to retain the ball within our structure.
We are conditioned to play with possession and, in the first half, we were constantly finding the lip of the Chiefs’ defence and bloodying it over and over again with edge passes, deep layers and excellent cross-kicking.
Remember this from the Red Eye?
What kills this defence? Many things.
Air raid cross-field kicking off a disguised screen move towards the tramline where you have a 6’9″ edge forward that can finish from the halfway line.
We got to see it in-game.
One thing you’ll notice about this sequence is how quick Casey’s passing is over a distance. It gives the receiver an extra heartbeat to process and execute against an aggressive, quick blitz defence and when you give good players that space, they’ll produce for you.
When you can’t cut out defenders or find your receivers quickly, however, you’ll get smashed up by a blitz defence so smashed up we were.
We had a chance to snag a win right at the death when we finally got some of the work we saw in the first 50 minutes – a cross kick, a pump-fake with an offload to a rampaging Brian Gleeson and then… a bad decision.
And that was that. Another game in a week that ends with the rugby equivalent of a sad trombone noise and, realistically, our European campaign on life support after just two rounds.
I’ve watched this game back four times and I still can’t really explain to you how that four-minute spell from 62 to 66 minutes blew this game open. I know why we didn’t come back from it – we were gassed up front, we didn’t have enough tight power coming off the bench and we lacked composure at #9 – but as to how we lost that 11-point lead in the first place? It just doesn’t make sense.
But here we are. We’ve got Leinster coming in eight days so whatever bad vibes are haunting us right now, they need to be purged over Christmas or more, industrial strength woe awaits.
| Name | Rating |
|---|---|
| Jeremy Loughman | ★★★ |
| Diarmuid Barron | ★★★ |
| Stephen Archer | ★★★ |
| Gavin Coombes | ★★★★ |
| Tadhg Beirne | ★★★ |
| Tom Ahern | ★★★★ |
| John Hodnett | ★★★★ |
| Jack O'Donoghue | ★★★ |
| Craig Casey | ★★★★ |
| Jack Crowley | ★★★★★ |
| Sean O'Brien | ★★★ |
| Alex Nankivell | ★★★ |
| Antoine Frisch | ★★★ |
| Calvin Nash | ★★★ |
| Shane Daly | ★★★ |
| Eoghan Clarke | DNP |
| Josh Wycherley | N/A |
| Oli Jager | ★★★★ |
| Brian Gleeson | ★★★ |
| Alex Kendellen | N/A |
| Conor Murray | ★ |
| Rory Scannell | DNP |
| Ben O'Connor | N/A |
