If you’ve been reading TRK for any period of time, you’ll know the importance I place on a good lineout and driving maul. To my mind, it’s the gold standard attacking platform and no team that has any hope of winning any silverware will have a poor one.

Last week, I looked at the actions Munster used off the maul but this week, I thought it would be interesting to look at our actual maul itself, with a focus on the defensive side of the ball in this article.

Mauls can be difficult things to judge on a TV screen. Like scrums, sometimes I wish there was an overhead camera that could really give us a good look at the action of a maul; the pulls, pushes, counters and micro actions that decide whether or not a scrum goes forwards or backwards.

That’s especially true when it comes to the pincer movements, outside shoves and drill movements of maul defence.

The Red Wall

Maul D is a mixture of technical application and mental fortitude. If you have good fundamentals of timing and power transfer allied with an attitude that these guys aren’t getting a f*cking inch off us today, you can take away a valuable weapon from the opposition.

Maul D is actually a form of psychological attack in its own way and top end maul defence can break an opposition pack mentally. On Saturday, that certainly seemed to be the case as far as the Ospreys were concerned.

First, let’s have a look at the numbers;

Team	Lineout Success	Maul Numbers
Ospreys	16 won, 1 lost (94%)	6 from 7 (85.7%)
Munster	10 won, 3 lost (76%)	7 from 9 (100%)

 

The very first thing we need to acknowledge here is how misleading these bare stats are. The Ospreys might have had 6 “successful” mauls in that they didn’t lose the ball directly from them but their maul was anything but a success in this game.

Let’s have a look at their Maul Momentum Map;

This one is worth looking at full size if you want to get the exact detail. Here, we can see that the Ospreys were dominated at maul time. Of their 7 mauls, only three made forward momentum and of those, they made less than four metres of gain collectively. They did score their try after a maul but that was more down to an error on our side, rather than any damage caused by the maul itself.

Their four other mauls all lost ground, even though they retained possession on each of them.

Why was this?

Well, for a start, we can see that Ospreys tended to go to the front when they chose to maul. All but one of their mauls took place any further back than the middle of the lineout so that made their maul action easy to track from a defensive point of view.

Pre-game, I noted that against Glasgow they played mainly off the back of the middle and tail but they severely cut down on this tactic here. Perhaps they wanted to make a physical statement against a Munster pack they fancied their chances against man for man? Whatever it was, their lack of mauling nous minus Alun Wyn Jones was clear.

The biggest aspect of successful mauling is disguising your landing area unless you have a distinct advantage earned in-game. The Ospreys were not very successful in hiding their landing zones, and we punished them for it again and again.

Let’s have a look at the Ospreys set up on a random maul feint from the first half as an example of how poor their deception was;

They did this quite a bit and it confused me. This is incredibly comfortable for Munster to defend. If Ospreys throw to the middle or tail, Munster have a set maul defence ready to go and, as Ospreys have abandoned the front of the maul, Munster know that any throw to the front will mean the tail of the Ospreys lineout having to run around to the front to push.

On this lineout, Munster know that they probably only have a throw off the top or a maul feint to worry about – their video work will have told them that.

We can see O’Donnell – a mobile, powerful tackler – is guarding the pocket of space at the front of the lineout with Williams so a tap down to Baker is unlikely to go man on man here. If it was, Baker would be closer to O’Donnell’s line to get separation from both O’Connor’s. Instead, Baker is tracking Davies, which tells Sean O’Connor that gambling on a counter jump here is worth the risk.

But because of Baker’s position, Billy Holland will have known that a maul feint break around the tail of the lineout is a big possibility – after all, Ospreys did more or less the same thing against Glasgow when they were in similar field position the previous week.

What happened in this instance? A slight variation, but broadly similar movements.

Fia steps in at the tail to make the space, as he did against Glasgow, but his holding of Marshall is way too obvious, as is this entire movement from the Ospreys. Munster’s video work – and Ospreys own set up – would have told them where this ball was going.

Ospreys middle-to-back setup was something they returned to again and again, with increasingly sloppy results.

Look here;

They start off clustered to the middle with James (Black #1) running a slack enough decoy tail lift on Tipuric, before turning in to lift Davies after a poor feint from Ashley. Munster don’t buy it at all because, again, there’s no front threat here. They can only go wide on this play once Holland sees James cut back to lift Davies. Sean O’Connor, the decoy target on this move, doesn’t commit to the jump and Munster can just resume defence without any time in the air.

When the decoying was this obvious, Munster could just sit and wait for the ball and even burn a counter jumper on occasion.

Here’s another example;

This one is so obvious that Rhys Marshall can run around the tail to join the defensive line before the ball hits the scrumhalf. James runs that decoy cut back line again, and as soon as Holland sees the Ospreys loosehead cut back with no jump motion from Davies, he knows it’s only going to the tail and Munster get Kleyn up for a full counter with coverage from O’Connor and Marshall to the left and right of the point of contact. Safe enough once everyone makes their tackles.

The decoy motion here is just way, way too slack.

Timing The Power

Maul defence is all about timing the power transfer to kill the opposition’s momentum. Sometimes you can try to sack the catcher on landing but that comes with risk attached – if you fail, you give the opposition pack a route to surge through if they keep their feet. So, for most sides, timing your counter punch on the moment of landing is the best way to attack the maul.

In this game, Munster managed this excellently. Look at this example here – for reference, this is Maul 3 on the Momentum Map I showed above;

Straight backs, all hitting the Ospreys front the minute they land with a combined counter punch that kills the Ospreys’ momentum stone dead and that’s with Kleyn, our strongest counter mauler held in reserve. You can see how the whole lineout turned out here if you’re interested.

Because we weren’t buying Ospreys deception, we were always in a position to counter their maul. The best maul is the one that lands behind or in front of the counter-shove. We always hit their jumper straight on and killed the move every time in this particular game.

Ospreys sixth maul (again, reference the momentum map) was the strongest counter maul of the game and really sucked a lot of energy out of them.

Look at the timing and strong shove on the counter, hit exactly on the point of landing;

That’s a four man counter shove killing a full six man maul. Kleyn’s power is the standout here – look at him collapsing the openside of the maul through Tipuric and Fia – but O’Connor, Holland and Ryan’s pincer movement on the blindside “burst the pimple” and send Ospreys backwards dramatically on the initial shove. Cronin and Scannell join in after Baldwin joins to salt the earth on this particular maul.

This kind of defensive maul power and timing bodes well for future games because when we set the Ospreys up, they just couldn’t get any forward motion.

Look at that. Like trying to maul the Cliffs of Moher.

If we keep this standard – and up it against better mauling teams – we’ll be well set going into the rest of the season.

I’ll have a look at Munster’s attacking maul work in tomorrow’s Premium article.

Thanks for reading, subscribers.