Munster 24 All Blacks XV 38

Bad Score, Good Night

A back and forth thriller showcased more in defeat than what we've seen in some wins this season after a miserable October. A loss is a loss, but the qualities shown probably outweigh the negatives on a great night for a game.

Quality of Opponent

Match Importance

Performance

Attack

Defence

Set Piece

3

Thriller

My routine for matches these days is pretty set. Leave home three hours before kick-off – four if I’m going to Cork – to make sure I’m parked up in good time in the LIT carpark. I like to be in the part of the LIT carpark near the astroturf soccer pitches so I can easily walk through the Shannon orange gate, amble past the smoky BBQ burger shark and over to collect my press pass at the media entrance on the East Stand.

I walk up the five flights of steps to the media section, unpack my laptop, and open my different tabs and apps to cover the game in the stadium.

When I get home after the game, I download my game file and start pulling MP4s from the game for the Wally Ratings and elsewhere. If the game started at five, I’d normally be heading to bed around half 11 or midnight, having left home at 2 PM. I’m not complaining. This is a class part of the job.

But when I saw Munster were going to play the All Blacks this November, I said to my fiance early on that we should go to that together.

By the end of the conversation, we had ten or twelve people coming with us, some of them to their first-ever rugby match. I had to scramble for tickets but, late on Friday afternoon, I got sorted.

Now my match day was much different. Get a spin into Limerick, park in the Dunnes by the Shannon, and walk over to Paul Flannerys on Shannon Street. Today was going to be different. A few drinks later we walked to Thomond Park in a throng of thousands, had another drink at the Shannon bar, and slowly made our way to the turnstiles for ten past five.

My fiance and I took our seats and let the atmosphere wash over us.

It’s a special place we have here. And a special thing. Don’t let anyone or anything let you forget it.

It’s easy to take it for granted when you view Munster through the prism of media hysterics, designed to entertain fans who aren’t you, and rage/doom bait those who are.

But watching the crowds ebb and flow outside the ground, seeing the craic develop in the bars between groups of strangers and then experiencing the atmosphere in the ground for the full 80 minutes?

You can’t beat it. That sense of community, that sense of place, that sense of belonging to something bigger than yourself. Win or lose, that’s something that not every club has, not even ones with overflowing trophy cabinets, and don’t you forget it.

***

We lost this game for broadly the same reasons that we have lost all of our last three games.

Specifically, the following;

• Too many turnovers
• Too many cheap scores conceded
• The set-piece not functioning as a whole and specifically when we need it.
• When the game slows down inside the 22 we look incrementally unlikely to score through the forwards without a complex, high-pressure release to the backline that often fails.

But that doesn’t mean it was a bad performance. On the contrary, the scoreboard only tells you who won and nothing about how close this game was for long periods or how close Munster were to yoinking a famous victory. But the issues are what they are and, until a remedy is found, we will continue to make life more difficult for ourselves against any serious opponent, which the All Blacks XV certainly were.

The first thing that stood out in the ground was our inability to convert our 22 entries, which we kept generating against a tough, aggressive New Zealand defence.

We got into the All Blacks XV 22 twelve times, with a return of just two points per entry on average. The All Blacks XV entered seven times for an average of 5.4 points per entry. That was bumped by two trying scoring entries in the last four minutes but it’s still a highly efficient return. This has been our Achilles heel all season and any serious opponent knows that any kind of slowdown once we get into the scoring zone is super effective because we don’t have the heft to start the momentum back up.

This is a good example of it, albeit from a pretty shallow 22-entry.

There’s just no pop in these carries and every contact point is a slog. Look at the ruck speed from when the Munster forward makes contact with the opposition until the ball is available to be played;

• Ruck 1: 4.39 seconds
• Ruck 2: 6.98 seconds

You can’t do much with that. The ABXV knew that defending tight would always hurt us because they knew we didn’t have physical game-changers close to the ruck in this squad. That left narrow windows of space to attack on the edges but getting the ball there demanded high-skill execution under pressure and that left us down over and over again.

Haley’s pass to Burns in the screen here had to be perfect because it was the only way that Burns could then snip the pass to Scannell around Naholo to unlock Barron and McCarthy in space.

Either way, the ABXV scramble probably shuts this down – and Burns did well to hang onto the pass – but slow ruck ball, poor collisions and inaccurate pressure passing make converting these moments more difficult than they ideally would be.

On the other side of the ball, we did a decent job of controlling territory and, with that, kept the All Blacks at arm’s length for most of the game. When it came to it though, we struggled to get decent stops in the middle of the field against a side that you absolutely do not want to give offload momentum to.

That’s our tight and middle-line defence giving up the initial crack and the ABXV are really good at doubling down on a linebreak. When we conceded to the ABXV it was almost always for the want of a good solid stop at some point in the scoring sequence.

What ended up being the ABXV’s killer try came off the back of a bad exit from Tony Butler off an incorrectly rushed mark. He kicked the ball long but didn’t make touch while a lot of our middle-line defence was frozen in the middle of the pitch – you can see the referee holding them all in place – and the ABXV killed us on transition.

The key moment is Devan Flanders running through Patterson and then Butler as they guarded the pillar of a transition ruck and that lost ground that, again, the ABXV are very good at capitalising on. Those turnovers are exactly what you can’t afford to give a team with this many strong edge runners.

But.

Munster never stopped scrapping. Not for a second. Anytime the ABXV shot ahead, Munster kept on pulling them back. Once we went to the bench, we even started to win a few tight collisions and that got us onto the front foot – as it tends to do. We were two points down heading into the last five minutes and I genuinely believe that without Rueben Love’s excellent ankle grabber on O’Connell in this clip, we score in the corner.

Small margins.

Our legs were gone. We turned over our lineout off the exit and a good rip by Fineen Wycherley ended up causing something of a defensive transition misalignment. They scored from range. We fought right back up the pitch but coughed up an intercept off a tired-looking screen pass gone awry.

That was that.

This was a two-point game that somehow blew out to a two-converted try game by full time but it doesn’t tell the true story of a scrappy, brave performance by Munster and how a pack powered by academy players almost beat an All Black representative side at the death. So close, but so far.

One thing that stood out in this game is how much simplicity the ABXV were able to play with for most of their possessions. They killed us in the scrum for the majority of the game and that meant our many turnovers became large losses of territory. Two of their scores came directly from that scrum dominance.

The key picture for the officials on this scrum was this;

But we were under pressure at the scrum while their front-line props were on the field. Bower and Dyer gave Archer and Ryan a torrid time, Bowyer in particular. It meant that our handling errors were more costly than normal. Even with that pain at scrum time, we still played much better than the last few weeks and almost all of that came down to being able to use the systems we’d put in place to compensate for the power we knew we wouldn’t have for the first block of the season.

Proper straight line running on the edges.

Diarmuid Kilgallen showcased exactly why we signed him – and Abrahams – in the off-season with a showcase of power running on the edges. No stutter-stepping, no stop-start, just gas.

The more pace and physicality that we have on the edges and in transition, the more likely we are to allow our current front row to impact against a defence resetting backwards when they hit that tight zone off #9 on those quick wide rucks.

That’s how we wanted to hit these first few weeks – get a bit of consistency at 10/12/13 and use Kilgallen and Abrahams, along with Nash and others as part of a high-speed back three rotation that could hurt teams on transition, in particular. Is it any surprise that we looked better offensively with Scannell and Farrell having two or three games with each other with pace and power outside them?

Not to me.

The last quarter showed so much about where this team can go, especially with guys like Ruadhan Quinn, Evan O’Connell and Ronan Foxe winning collisions in the middle of the field.

These next three weeks are vital for the club to settle down after a bruising and inflamed October. The vibes after this game are good, even in defeat, and they’ll give guys like Costello and Prendergast the head-room to get some guys back healthy, first and foremost, and then get a good review into what we want to be going forward for the rest of this season and beyond.

But for now, good game, good craic and more than little to be positive about.