Munster 17 Emirates Lions 10

Stop the Bleeding

It won't make any end of season highlight videos, but it's a great illustration of what Munster can do when our defence hits, elements of our offloading game stick and our lineout runs like that of a professional team at this level.

Quality of Opponent

Match Importance

Performance

Attack

Defence

Set Piece

3.9

Better

It was scrappy, ugly, and the kind of greasy ball/heavy pitch combination that has tripped up Munster for the last two years, but all we had to do was win it, and we did.

That’s all that matters, for the moment at least. Three losses on the spin – four, when you count the All Blacks (xv) – is the kind of bleeding that will kill anything if it’s not cauterized. Cauterization is painful. This game was painful. But the bleeding has stopped and that’s all that matters.

The Emirates Lions are no joke; anyone who’s paid any attention to them over the last two years would realise that. Almost completely unaffected by the Springbok call-ups, they rocked up in Thomond Park as close to fully loaded as possible, barring one or two injuries. Reading that back, I think it’s vaguely insulting to suggest that they are “no joke” as if some observer somewhere might consider it. The Lions are the epitome of crafty squad building on a budget and when you go through each line of their team you find yourself going; yep, top player, underrated, probably will be a Springbok when he moves to the Sharks, underrated, actual Springbok, top player. They have quality in spades and if you rock up on them expecting the Southern Kings, you’ll get rocked.

One thing was clear early on – if Munster were going to lose this game, it wasn’t because we took a win for granted. The heavy pitch and greasy ball meant we would have to engage directly with a team that kicks long and pragmatically, that doesn’t give away cheap penalties (lowest penalty count in the league by 16 penalties) and that gives you almost zero access through the scrum.

Like so many things; we were going to have to do this the hard way.

What is “the hard way” in this context? Running a lot of phase ball to tire their defence and wait for the lateral drop-offs in the middle of the field that we could exploit. But, again, heavy pitch, greasy ball – it wasn’t going to be easy.

And it wasn’t. But we had to commit to bossing possession and playing expansively to get what we wanted out of the Lions later in the game. Sticking to truck ball off #9 wasn’t feasible or likely to be effective, so we had to double down on offloading to stagger their defensive positioning;

This looks sloppy and high risk – and it is – but this was the approach Munster had to take to keep the Lions moving on a heavy pitch that favoured defensive stops. So you’ve got to play with a lot of passing, and a lot of line running to get anything out of a defence that gives you gaps after the second and third pass, but on a night where that third pass is incredibly difficult to land.

We are becoming an offloading team. Last season, Munster were bottom five in the URC for offload success, bottom four for the number of successful offloads that assisted a linebreak, and midtable for offloads that assisted a try.

This season?

Top six for successful offloads in Europe. Top six for successful offloads that assisted a linebreak. Top five for successful offloads that assisted a try or a linebreak directly. By volume, we’ve thrown the second most offloads in the URC so far this season. Last season we were sixth. We have two players in the top five for offloading with Tom Farrell at #1 ahead of RG Snyman.

So sequences like this aren’t accidental or a product of “throwing passes to no one”. It is a core part of what we are trying to do on the offensive side of the ball.

I think our reasoning is that we can’t bully teams with “process” – we don’t have the horses for that – but we do have proper gas and athleticism on the middle and edges of our team. If we can get these players into “chaotic” situations, they can score tries from distance.

And we did just that.

This is what we’re trying to create, even if it’s messy.

It will work consistently when we can back it up with our usual defensive solidity of the last two seasons and with an actual functioning lineout.

We had both for this game, so we won. It’s as simple as that, for me. Our attack can create opportunities from the middle of the field with the ball in hand – as opposed to kicking for advantage – so that will be a point of difference but it won’t matter if our lineout platform doesn’t work in tandem with it.

This is where Alex Codling comes in and, immediately, our lineout performance snapped back to the levels you would expect from a team at this level.

Our lineout ran at 89% for the night on nine lineouts, which is a refreshing change from the last three URC games. We had usable possession and a solid platform to work with. So what was different?

Well – clarity. Sense. Logic. Showing the Lions something different.

For example, see how Stephen Archer – the back prop lifter – scoots to the front of the lineout here?

That’s the first time Munster have done anything like that this season. Why do it? It throws off the defensive concepts of the opposition who are used to seeing Munster go with a “big” lineout setup of prop lifters book-ending the lineout and our jumping core three piece shell game in between them.

Teams had a lot of joy just jumping in the middle on the hooker’s release because it’s where we mostly threw to with the same old animations and concepts.

Archer started in the position they’d expect him to be in but moved to the front so he could become a non-jumping hinge player. We had been using one of our primary jumpers in schemes like this with the shell game being that they can either lift, dummy, or jump but that failed to mask our primary middle target.

With Archer as the hinge, he has four possibilities – lifting at the front, lifting at the middle, dummying at the middle, or escorting to the tail.

In this case, he hinged and lifted O’Donoghue in the middle for a clean take that the Lions wanted to contest but couldn’t get anywhere near.

We used this concept a fair bit. Here’s the same lineout play from earlier in the game with John Ryan scooting in to look like a bookend lifter when Lions first assess, but a hinge lifter after the walkup.

Clean take in the middle.

We even managed a double cut out 5m from our tryline on a four man scheme and landed it so cleanly that the Lions didn’t even get in the air.

Why did it work? Because we only used one prop in this build so we were quicker over the ground and for the simple fact that Wycherley very much looked like he was going to jump up in this moment, and not out.

Munster’s lineout already looks sharper, cleaner and better drilled with less default stuff borrowed from the Irish playbook like the opposite side dummy transit on the maul and the two pod set up.

If we can stay on that trajectory, we have the game to hurt most teams with anything close to an even deck injury wise.

All in all, a badly needed win at exactly the right time. But Big December is here and the lights are brighter than ever. We need solidity, competence and two home wins.