If you want to beat a side like Scarlets, you have to retain the ball.

If you’re loose with your possession, the Champions have shown repeatedly that they have the ability to ruin your attacking plan and turn it into their attacking plan. On Saturday, Munster were faced with that very dilemma and went about it in a very direct way.

I had written before the game about the effectiveness and counter-intuitive low-risk nature of a playing a slightly wider alignment against the Scarlets and Munster certainly used that pattern between the 10m lines when it came to building pressure.

You can see the structure here;

But the original GIF showed something important that checked Munster’s carrying patterns all through the game.

Look at Beirne’s line speed onto Archer as the “arrowhead carrier” on this pod.

He’s not shooting on the first receiver like you might expect in this scenario, he’s spiking straight towards Holland and then onto Archer in an attempt to stuff this pattern before it has the potential to set a “beachhead” ruck in centrefield.

It was a high-risk play – just look at the space they risked to stop this pattern from developing.

This was a common enough feature of Scarlets’ defence when Munster stacked a big openside play. They put good pressure on Munster’s first receiver and first receiver pass option on more than a few occasions (Beirne, Shingler and Davies were good at this, in particular) and it forced Munster to play a little narrower. That narrow alignment didn’t affect Munster negatively and actually funnelled Munster into playing a direct style of rugby that proved to be a game winner.

That fringe pressure started to pay dividends as Munster’s carry and rucking in tight three-man pods generated a good mix of gain line and quick ball.

Remember Scarlets’ narrow defensive line? They use that to make sure they don’t get ground up through the middle with tight carries and give them options over the ball to slow possession. Munster posed a simple question to them – what if you can’t stop the carry or slow possession?

This was the answer.

Look at how many times Munster managed to blow Beirne off the ball in this sequence! The lines are tight, narrow and provide lightning quick ball to the halfback, who feeds the next wave running onto the ball.

Even Keatley’s isolated run gets cleaned without fuss. There’s very little that can be done to stop Munster when we play as tight as this with as much rhythm and tempo that we managed in this particular instance.

Munster were able to narrow Scarlets defensive dramatically with the intensity of our possession retention. Look at this instance a few carries after a good maul;

The Scarlets are compacted between the 15m lines.

That isn’t too unusual necessarily – maybe a little odd this far from their try line – but watch what happens when the ball comes back inside off Arnold’s carry to Rhys Marshall.

The pull-back pass to Hanrahan exposes how tight Scarlets were forced to number up on Munster’s forwards.

That exposed this opportunity for Hanrahan;

Only Kilcoyne’s positioning prevented this from going wide to Copeland and then Nash for a possible finish.

Munster’s ability to consistently get over the gain line in small increments while retaining possession and pace on the ball took away Scarlets’ line speed and prevented them from winning momentum changing penalties on the floor.

Munster were burning men in the rucks but it didn’t matter. Scarlets couldn’t get a line set, were losing two defenders per ruck and were consistently walking backwards while narrowing all the time.

Scarlets didn’t just decide to lose the breakdown – Munster took it from them by force once we managed to get our hands on the ball for extended periods in the second half.

 

Opening Salvo

In fairness, Munster didn’t get many opportunities to build an attacking structure in the first half, given Scarlets’ domination of possession and, in fairness, the effectiveness of our scrum > penalty > lineout > 5m pressure sequence did the job extremely well. It’s the easiest way to play, after all, and Munster certainly used that sequence to great effect for the first try.

When we put the ball through the hands, we used a few different carrying combinations to build pressure and, in a lot of ways, examine Scarlets defensive tactics over the ball. One thing was for certain early on – we were in no mood to mess around at the breakdown on our possession with some very strong performances.

Here are the ruck stats for the game. You can filter each column for the top performers in each of the categories.

As a guideline, a Dominant Action is an action that cleanly secures possession when the ball hits the deck. In essence, a Dominant Action is where the cleanout helps to “re-win” the possession on the floor in a strong, decisive manner and adds value to the following phase.

A Guard Action is where a player plays a role in helping to retain possession after we have “re-won” the ball on the floor. Sometimes this can happen on a carry where there is no active contention by the opposition.

A Passive Action can be anything from standing as a “kick shield” on a ruck to adding a bit of bulk to ward against a counter-ruck.

An Ineffective Action is a blown cleanout, a ruck lean or an action that I couldn’t see any direct benefit for.

Player	Dominant Action	Guard Action	Passive Action	Ineffective Action
Kilcoyne	2	3	1	0
Marshall	1	3	3	0
Ryan	4	7	0	0
Kleyn	9	4	2	0
Holland	17	12	1	1
O'Donoghue	20	4	1	0
O'Donnell	4	1	1	1
Copeland	11	15	1	0
Hart	1	2	0	1
Keatley	3	4	1	0
Wootton	3	0	0	0
R. Scannell	3	2	0	0
Arnold	6	6	0	0
Nash	1	1	0	0
Hanrahan	2	3	0	0
N. Scannell	4	0	0	0
Cronin	6	2	0	1
Archer	1	4	2	0
Grobler	3	5	0	0
O'Callaghan	6	5	0	1
Goggin	1	0	0	0
Fitzgerald	2	1	0	0

O’Donoghue’s numbers in here are quite impressive. His rucking had a good range and pace, with an aggressive, clinical execution throughout. He was on the edge at times for sure, but that’s what you need sometimes, especially against a side like the Scarlets that like to flood the areas around the tackle point with “landmine” runners to stall clean-out lines. That added great value to his work on either side of the throw in the lineout and his work with the ball as a wide forward option. Billy Holland was his usual efficient self, leading the line with massive contributions as a dominant cleaner and a strong guard presence.

We’ll need this kind of rucking performance plus an awful lot more against Toulon this weekend but the attitude, physicality and pace we showed against Scarlets is a great place to start.