I think it was inevitable that Munster would look to make signings in the tight five this offseason. The only questions were “who” and “why them.”
Those questions then beg the question of what you need from your front row as a unit. What do they do well? What don’t they do well? When you’re recruiting from a position of relative weakness, you have to focus on the negatives. For me, Munster’s biggest issue in the front row is a lack of heft and power in phase play. We already have quite a few good scrummagers and support forward build options in our roster, even if you remove the veterans we’re likely to lose this offseason, so finding players to add variety to that is eminently sensible.
In the modern game, looking for props who are scrummagers first and foremost almost seems like an anachronism. A great example of this principle was Dian Blueler’s recent and hugely successful medical joker stint at the province during which time he was, objectively, an inferior scrummager to Jeremy Loughman and Josh Wycherley. He conceded more scrum penalties during that 12-week stint than Jeremy Loughman has in the last 12 months but it didn’t matter.
What mattered was the platform he helped to set for the team with his heavy and relentless carrying, tackling and ruck work. His scrummaging was… fine. Decent. OK. That’s all it had to be. The real benefit of his game happened away from the set piece most associated with props and when you look through the game, that is becoming more and more prevalent.
If it was just down to scrummaging, Munster wouldn’t need to sign any front-row players this year. But it isn’t. So we must. That’s where Michael Milne and Lee Barron come into the equation.
At 6’0″ and 115kg, Michael Milne comes to the province looking the part anyway. He is what you want the modern-day prop to look like. That is to say – huge.
Milne has spent the majority of the last six years of his time at Leinster putting on the kind of elite size that you need to survive in the modern game and that has come with positives and negatives. The negatives are injuries – he’s been regularly set back with injuries every season since he broke in at Leinster and it’s hampered him from becoming the defacto backup to Porter in that time as a result. Milne was in the same u20 class as Josh Wycherley back in 2018/19 and made nine bench appearances for Leinster a season later before the pandemic started to wreak havoc.
His next two seasons were a wash with various injuries limiting him to eight games total before he had something of a breakout year in 2022/23. Milne played sixteen games that season, eight as a starter and went on a run where he scored six tries in five games. All of them were the kind of close-range slammers that we haven’t been able to properly execute all season long.
If he can duplicate that kind of performance at Munster, he’ll score 5+ tries every season. His 2023/24 was another frustrating one where he was never quite able to fully dislodge the heavily trusted Cian Healy as Porter’s 1B. Injury, again, played a role. That said, Milne managed to get on the bench for the biggest game of his career so far in the quarter-final win over La Rochelle in April of last season before being sent on the dreaded – for Leinster, anyway – dirt-tracker tour of South Africa that shows you exactly where you stand in the coaching group’s thoughts.
They are preparing for European knockout games in Dublin and if you’re in Johannesburg, my guy they don’t see you at that level. The pecking order was pretty clear for Milne. There was Porter, then Healy, then a mixture of him, Boyle and probably Paddy McCarthy also all vying for dog minutes in the hope that Cian Healy would finally break down long enough that one of them might become a regular in the only games for Leinster that matter – European knockout games. As a result, rumours swirled last season that Milne (and/or Boyle) would move south to Munster in the summer of 2024 but both ended up re-signing for Leinster on contracts of indeterminate length.
There was a bit of confusion inside the Irish rugby WhatsApp bubble that both had re-signed. All season long, the talk had been that one would probably move for (a) more opportunity, (b) more money and (c) Leinster couldn’t possibly keep everyone below Porter and Healy happy at that point in their careers.
Initially, it was thought that Milne would be the one to move. He’d missed the first half of last season due to injury – he only made his return for Leinster in March of 2024, a week or so after scoring this banger for UCD in the AIL.
Yet, in May 2024, he was announced as having re-signed a senior contract with Leinster on what many assumed to be a two-year deal. Munster made a late play for Jack Boyle around the same time out of the academy but he also signed on for a full senior contract at Leinster. Milne had signed his contract before Boyle, even though Milne’s was announced afterwards.
People that I’ve spoken to think that what probably happened was that Milne and Boyle – both live flight risks before signing their contracts – were essentially promised the same thing for this season. This happens a lot in pro-rugby, especially when you have a lot of young guys breaking through in the same position that you don’t want to lose.
There were even more rumours about Milne moving in August/September of this year with an apparent dissatisfaction on his part concerning his role (and future minutes) at Leinster, something he was able to garner during the preseason. I wouldn’t put too much stock in these rumours personally but it is useful to consider now that he’s been announced as signing a two-year deal at Munster from this summer on.
He will immediately jump into the conversation for 1A loosehead, vying with Loughman and, for me, a step ahead of Josh Wycherley.
So what is the story with Michael Milne?
From a role perspective, I would class him as a Power Forward Prop. Carrying the ball is his big strength as a player and it’s something our front five really needs. I would say that Leinster’s move to a more “off-ball” build has damaged Milne’s prospects more than anything else. If we compare his carrying data from last season – he hasn’t played enough to season to make a fair comparison – he stacks up well with some players of interest.
| Name | Dominant Carry % | Gainline % | 2+ Tacklers Committed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Andrew Porter 24/25 | 25.0% | 40.9% | 59.1% |
| Michael Milne 23/24 | 32.0% | 50.0% | 60.0% |
| Thomas Du Toit 24/25 | 29.5% | 60.0% | 66.0% |
| Pierre Schoeman 24/25 | 29.3% | 54.1% | 62.4% |
| Jeremy Loughman 23/24 | 22.3% | 50.0% | 67.3% |
| Josh Wycherley 23/24 | 15.4% | 34.5% | 62.1% |
What stands out there is Milne’s dominant carry % – it puts him right up there with backrows like Anthony Jelonch, as opposed to other props in his approximate role set, or compared to guys like Porter, Loughman or Wycherley. What does that mean? He wins collisions. And when you consider that he’s a near/tight carrier primarily, that maps well for what we’re looking for.
This is a good example of the kind of small wins he can get you, even on a tight set on your own 10m line. He gets the ball pretty loose, wins the collision with two other tight forwards and gets the gainline. It’s not dramatic, it’s quite small, but it showcases something we need – someone who can win collisions like that on his own against two defenders.
It’s inside the 22 that Milne’s game really goes up a notch. He’s got a really powerful first step which means that if he gets any kind of nudge in the collision, he’s a live try-scoring threat inside the 5m line in a way we don’t have in the squad at the moment. He’s also pretty wide so he can easily provide a target for aggressive latchers to drive through on him. He’s just as good as a supporting player in this zone; he gets low, and he transfers power well on the latch.
At the lineout, he runs as a front lifter and has pretty good basics, as well as being a strong lifter and mauler. The biggest work-on for him is his scrummaging which can get away from him against technical tightheads. I’ve found he does quite well against heavyweight tightheads as long as the overall scrum is stable as he’s naturally very strong. At this point, I would say all of his best work is away from the scrum but that’s fine; we’ve seen in the last five years that all you need to be is a passable scrummager at worst, and he’s certainly that.
I see his role initially being a 30-minute hitter in the 17 jersey, which is something we’ve badly missed on big days. He can start games, of course, but at his size his effectiveness dips after 50 minutes. With that in mind, I think he can be a killer for us off the bench or alternating with Loughman as 1/17. Most of his best work for Leinster has been utilizing that power-forward build later in games where he wins the kind of gainline that we currently do not do. I think that alone acts as a level-raiser for our pack over 80 minutes because of what it will allow others to do alongside him.
Milne isn’t going to be a superstar signing like Tadhg Beirne – at least, I don’t think so – but he can give us a lot of what we got from Dian Bleuler with a lot more heft and punch all around the field.
