There is a number buried in Munster’s season that explains more than any highlight reel: -417.

That is, approximately, the net territory Munster surrendered through scrum penalties across their URC campaign — more than four full pitch lengths, marched backwards ten and twenty metres at a time. Over nineteen league games, including the quarter-final, Munster conceded 41 scrum penalties and won just 18. The penalties we gave up handed our opponents approximately 18 entries into the Munster 22; the ones we won created barely half as many at the other end.

The raw scrum statistics, on their own, don’t tell you this. On our own put-in, Munster retained roughly 90 per cent of our ball, a perfectly respectable figure. In fourteen of our games last season, we were basically scrummaging on level terms; against the Welsh sides, the Italians, Edinburgh and our Irish provincial rivals outside Dublin, the scrum was solid, disciplined, never really dominant, but far from a liability.

The penalties tell a different story, and a far more uncomfortable one. They came in clusters, and the clusters had a theme. Six fixtures — Leinster away, the Stormers, Glasgow, the Sharks, and the Bulls twice — produced 26 of the 41 penalties, better than four per game. The other thirteen matches produced fifteen. Munster’s scrum was not penalised by the league as a whole; it was penalised by the league’s best packs, i.e. the ones standing between this team and silverware.

This is the story of a scrum that held up, survived, almost everywhere — except exactly where, and exactly when, it mattered most.

Watching all of these back, the scrum penalties that we won need context, too; they were almost all technical penalties — collapsing or angling from the opposition. We very, very rarely pumped another team off their own ball.

Part of that comes back to the timing of our scrum troubles, which broadly began after the Edinburgh home game when Oli Jager suffered a concussion that would keep him out for three months.

After that game — Leinster and the Stormers were the proof of this — our scrum went through the wringer. I didn’t get data for the Bath game, even though we ran into trouble there too, and traded about even with Gloucester in Cork, before stabilising the scrum over the next block of games until the block of four games that followed: Glasgow, Zebre (a wash) and the South African tour.

You can see it pretty clearly.

What’s most revealing is how we responded. Somewhere in the back half of the season, the ambition visibly drained out of the scrum. This stopped being a platform to try to generate penalties and pressure and became a problem to be managed.

You can see it in the numbers. After the bruising of the Glasgow trip and the South African tour — eleven penalties in three games — Munster’s scrum went into it’s shell. Three penalties conceded across the final four regular-season games. Not a single lost feed on our own ball in that stretch. On paper, a recovery. In reality, something closer to a retreat: a pack scrummaging for parity rather than dominance, setting up to secure its own ball at minimum, absorb the hit, and get the ball out before anything could be adjudicated. The scrum was a unit built to survive.

And survival made sense, because by then, everyone knew. Opposition packs don’t need to read spreadsheets to identify a vulnerable scrum; they feel it through their shoulders after the first engagement. Every side Munster met in the spring arrived with the same plan — keep the ball in, squeeze, force the penalty. Munster’s counter was to deny them the contest altogether: quick channel-one ball, low scrum counts, keep it out of the referee’s hands where possible.

Because the referee had become part of the problem.

Officials carry reputations into games the same way players do, and by mid-season, Munster’s scrum had one. At the elite level, most scrum penalties are interpretations of a collapsing mess, and interpretations follow expectations. A pack seen as the weaker unit doesn’t get the benefit of the marginal call — it gets pinged. Once Leinster, the Stormers and Glasgow had established the narrative, Munster were scrummaging against the opposition and the precedent simultaneously. Shoring was the only tactical choice to make. It was an attempt to scrub the reputation before the games that mattered.

It nearly worked. Munster arrived in Pretoria off their cleanest scrummaging month of the season. But survival scrummaging has a ceiling, and the Bulls found it inside the first quarter. The Bulls have the best, biggest scrum in the league, and with pretty much a full deck against a depleted Munster pack, a scrum built not to lose, in the end, simply lost more slowly.

If we harbour real ambitions for next season, the fix can’t be structural caution.

It has to be built around a scrum worth fearing again, or at the very least, one that can’t be so readily exploited by the elite.