So, with the season done and dusted for the last few weeks, I went back and did a deep dive on our Net Efficiency rankings, as well as watching every single game back, from the opener away to Scarlets, all the way through to the second loss to the Bulls in Loftus Versfeld.

You know what stood out? The sheer volume of games that teetered on a knife-edge for way, way too long. It was constant. Well, that and the horror starts. The number of games where we lost the race to ten points, only to fight back, struggle and then see out a killer scramble that often went late into the game.

I’ve been tracking our Net Efficiency all season, but I hadn’t kept up with it through the Six Nations block. So, with the season over, I went back to see if the data backed up what my eyes — and heart rate — showed.

Across 24 games in all competitions, Munster entered the opposition 22 a total of 218 times and scored at 2.34 points per visit. Our opponents entered 209 times and scored at 2.39. Over a full season of red-zone efficiency, for and against, our season settled out at −0.05 points per entry. It was hovering at just over that zero mark for the season, and the final run of games tipped it under the baseline, mainly on the defensive side of the ball.

In elite club rugby, somewhere between 2.8 and 3.0 points per entry is the marker of a genuinely efficient attack. That’s the elite benchmark. Munster cleared 3.0 in just eight of 24 games and finished the season at 2.34. The raw entry volume was fine — 9.1 per game is genuinely pretty good — but the return on each visit consistently fell short of what the position was worth.

Where it gets interesting is how different the Europe vs the URC played out.

In the URC, Munster posted a net of +0.29 per entry, attacking at 2.48 and conceding 2.19, even while being out-entered throughout the campaign.

In Europe, the model collapsed entirely. Munster averaged 11.6 entries per game — close to five more than their opponents, genuine entry dominance — and converted at just 1.94 while shipping 3.34 at the other end. Bath scored 5.7 points per visit from only seven entries. Exeter took 3.5 from eight while Munster managed 1.4 from fifteen. These games were lost comprehensively on 22 efficiency. The quarter-final then completed the set, just inverted: out-entered 13 to 9 and out-converted 3.2 to 1.5, the only elimination in which Munster lost both the volume battle and the efficiency battle at once.

That volume-versus-conversion split is the season distilled. Munster won both battles in the same game just four times — Gloucester, Ospreys, Zebre, Benetton — all sides from the lower reaches in both tournaments. Against every elite opponent, they won one or neither. And the most revealing cluster is the games they won on efficiency alone: Leinster away (3.5 from eight entries), Glasgow away (3.6 from six entries), Toulon (3.1 from six entries), and the home Ulster game (4.5 from nine entries).

Six of the eight most efficient attacking performances came away from home on low entry counts. Munster converted best off scarcity — transition, first-strike scores — and worst when camped in opposition territory, where Edinburgh (1.8 from 11), Connacht at home (1.5 from 11) and Exeter (1.4 from 15) all watched long occupations produce almost nothing.

The URC away attack ran at 2.58 per entry against 2.39 at home, from fewer visits. The fingerprint is consistent across the whole dataset, and it shows the same picture: a team that lived and, too often, died on narrow outcomes.

Even defensively, we had a weird season where we were generally quite good at denying entries, but went through spells where we seemed to concede on every other entry we did concede.

You can see that, in a grand sense, in the win/loss record.

The season finished 12 wins, 12 losses, and the margins tell a story of their own.

Average winning margin: +13.3 points.
Average losing margin: −15.3 points.

Across the whole season, Munster scored 530 and conceded 553 — a deficit of roughly one point per game, which sits neatly alongside the −0.05 per entry from the 22 data.

The averages hide a sharply polarised distribution, though.

The wins split into two groups: blowouts against weaker opposition — Benetton 45-15, Gloucester 31-3, Ulster 41-14 at home, Scarlets 34-21 — and a cluster of extremely tight escapes: Edinburgh by one, Connacht by two, Dragons by two, Cardiff by three. Four of the twelve wins were by three points or fewer; the median win was 13.5.

The losses split the same way. Against quality sides, Munster lost narrowly and repeatedly — Toulon by two, Castres by two, the Bulls by three in Pretoria in March, Leinster by five at home, Stormers by six. But when it went wrong, it went catastrophically wrong: 45-0 to the Sharks, 45-14 in the quarter-final, 40-14 at Bath, 28-3 at Ulster, 26-7 at Connacht.

Five defeats by 19 or more, every one of them away from home, and four of those five are the same games that sat in or around the “lost both” quadrant of the 22 analysis. The median loss was only 9.5 — the heavy beatings drag the average up by nearly six points.

So the margin data confirms what the entry data implied: this was a team that lived on the edge in tight games (a combined record of won 4, lost 5 in matches decided by six or fewer), stayed competitive with elite sides when the counter-punching game functioned, and completely collapsed on the road roughly once every five games. The one-point and two-point wins kept the league season respectable; the 26-to-45-point defeats are where the season’s identity problem became more profound.

If I had to pull one thread out of all of it, we don’t have a possession problem, we have a conversion identity problem — and it runs in exactly the wrong direction for knockout rugby or even progressing to favourable knockout rugby locations, i.e. securing home draws.

Our best red-zone rugby all season came when entries were scarce. Leinster away, Glasgow away, Toulon, the home Ulster game — low entry counts, high returns, scores built without being camped in the 22 for long periods.

When we arrived in the 22 at pace, we were genuinely efficient. But the moment we were camped there — Edinburgh, Connacht at home, fifteen entries at Exeter for 21 points — the returns collapsed. We cannot currently break down a set defence through sustained pressure, and that runs through everything from the data to actually watching the games back as live.

The reason that should worry us is that knockout rugby is precisely the game we’re bad at. Bath, Exeter and the Bulls all beat us in elimination-adjacent fixtures, and in two of those three, we dominated the entry battle. Big games come down to who takes more from fewer visits, and we conceded 3.34 per entry in Europe while scoring 1.94. That’s the problem right there.

So the takeaway: either we build an attack that can monetise camped possession, or we commit fully to the transition identity and engineer more of the chaos we score from. What we can’t do is keep splitting the difference, because the ledger of the season shows that pretty clearly: minus 0.05 points per entry, across an entire campaign.

Those margins are too small, too narrow, to live with comfortably next season.