The longer a season goes on, the more footage opposition teams have of your strengths and, more often than not, your weaknesses.
If you see a team doing particularly well for the first two-thirds of a season – or a particularly important halfback – only to see them see them fall away towards the end, what you’re looking at might be fatigue or injury, but it is also probably the combined intellectual effort of every single coaching group deploying countermeasures on that team across the season. By the time the business end of the season comes around, any team in a position to challenge for titles will have a world of concepts to try out on their opposition, both on the micro and macro levels.
Sometimes this is done purely on video analysis. Still, data plays a much bigger role in how teams exploit certain tendencies in the opposition in the modern era, especially some of the deeper data.
Munster are no exception, of course. If anything, this season has presented the first main answer to our squad’s primary game-state weaknesses early and often. Our primary weakness is this; we cannot carry the ball dominantly in possession and teams have already adapted to this.
You can see this in our ruck speed, oddly enough.
I’m doing an interprovincial special ORW article ahead of the Six Nations, but Leinster showed us in Thomond Park what our weaknesses were. Castres did the same. Saracens tried to do the same but couldn’t do it to the same level.
Against Leinster, 67% of our ruck ball was completed in under three seconds. Against Saracens, it was 60%. Against Castres, it was 74%.
What does this tell us? That Leinster, Castres and Saracens didn’t really rate our ability to carry the ball as part of their high-edge blitz patterns but were worried about getting picked off in the layers so they conceded quick ball at the ruck to swarm our passing lines with bodies.
The maxim follows that if you’re worried about an opponent’s carrying – and you can see what it looks like from a data perspective – then you commit bodies to the ruck to slow their progression across the field and encourage kick resets. If you aren’t worried about a team’s carrying threat in the near spaces then it stands to reason that you would concede the ruck and flood the middle and wide spaces with bodies to prevent high pass-per-carry teams from passing around you.
You can’t do both.
As a result, our ORW scoring has been distorted. Have a look at the scoring from the Saracens game;
Saracens ORW Scoring – ERCC Round 3
| Dominant Clean | Guard Action | Attendance | Ineffective | Ruck Work Score | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Bleuler | 2 | 12 | 3 | 33 | |
| 2. Scannell | 1 | 10 | 1 | 24 | |
| 3. Jager | 2 | 11 | 28 | ||
| 4. Wycherley | 2 | 15 | 3 | 1 | 37 |
| 5. Beirne | 1 | 12 | 27 | ||
| 6. O'Donoghue | 10 | 1 | 21 | ||
| 7. Kendellen | 2 | 7 | 2 | 1 | 20 |
| 8. Coombes | 1 | 10 | 1 | 24 | |
| 9. Murray | 1 | 2 | |||
| 10. Crowley | 1 | 2 | 7 | ||
| 11. Daly | 3 | 5 | 1 | 20 | |
| 12. Scannell | 7 | 14 | |||
| 13. Farrell | 5 | 10 | |||
| 14. Nash | 5 | 10 | |||
| 15. Haley | 2 | 6 | 18 | ||
| 16. Barron | 1 | 13 | 1 | 27 | |
| 17. J. Ryan | 1 | 6 | 15 | ||
| 18. Archer | 2 | 7 | 1 | 21 | |
| 19. Ahern | 3 | 6 | |||
| 20. Hodnett | 4 | 8 | |||
| 21. Patterson | 0 | ||||
| 22. Burns | 0 | ||||
| 23. Gleeson | 3 | 1 | 7 |
Top ORW Scorers
- Fineen Wycherley – 37 points
- Dian Bleuler – 33 points
- Oli Jager – 28 points
- Diamuid Barron/Tadhg Beirne – 27 points
- Gavin Coombes/Niall Scannell – 24 points
What does this tell us?
One – that Wycherley and Bleuler had excellent games when it comes to ruck security and business. Beirne followed the usual trajectory of ramping his ruck involvements up as the game progressed but carried the ball a good bit more than usual here, so his ruck numbers are naturally that bit lower than normal. Barron’s impact as a ruck support player off the bench was excellent with lots of involvements.
Our Collective Offensive Ruck Work scoring was 379 exactly, which is right around the same level as the losses to Leinster and the Stormers and around 100 points lower than the wins over the Lions and Stade Francais. Why is this? To understand that, we need to look at some of the deeper number associations.
When you consider our efficiency per ruck entry – literally how efficiently each chosen action around the ruck pertained to the security of that ruck for the next phase of possession – the performance against Saracens was the best we’ve seen from this team all season long. Each entry was high value on average.
ORW Points Per Ruck Entry
Saracens – 1.97 ORW points per ruck entry
Stade Français – 1.88 ORW points per ruck entry
Lions – 1.89 ORW points per ruck entry
Sharks – 1.82 ORW points per ruck entry
Stormers – 1.87 ORW points per ruck entry
Leinster – 1.83 ORW points per ruck entry
And when we look at the average number of entries per ruck – a metric that shows us how many attacking bodies we lost to each ruck on average across the game – we see that we were as close to 2 as we’ve been all season, especially against blitzing teams.
Ruck Entries Per Ruck
Saracens – 2.1 Ruck Entries per Ruck.
Stade Français – 2.2 Ruck Entries per Ruck
Lions – 2.2 Ruck Entries per Ruck
Sharks – 2.3 Ruck Entries per Ruck
Stormers – 2.45 Ruck Entries per Ruck
Leinster – 2.2 Ruck Entries per Ruck
What does this tell us? We have seen the adaptation that teams have used against us, and we’re slowly trying to adapt to that adaptation. Our ruck entries are trending lower which means we understand the value of keeping forward bodies in the attacking line when the opposition is conceding quick ruck ball.
We’re also using “barges” to punish teams who fly off the ruck too quickly. Here’s the best example from the game against Saracens.
O’Donoghue shoots in to push – or barge – Itoje away from the ruck and create a roadblock for the Saracens fold. In this case, it stops Harry Wilson from going directly into Bleuler’s carrying line, and that in turn creates a half-break for Munster into the Saracens 22.
Look through Munster’s performance and you’ll see this “barge” everywhere as we try to punish teams for standing off us. Beirne manages a really good one here that opens up space around the ruck.
I think it’s designed with the new laws around the scrumhalf in mind because of the time and space it gives them to snipe into space now that they can’t be scragged.
That even led to Munster’s first try against Saracens. What do you do if the opposition aren’t competing at the ruck and are, instead, trying to flood the middle and edge spaces? You pick and go. Attack the space they leave behind.
We’ll need all of this craftiness around the ruck this coming week against Northampton because we know – or can strongly suspect – that they will try to duplicate the success that Leinster and Castres had in the same way.
