This will be difficult.
With the relative selections between both sides, this is about as difficult a task as last weekend’s game against Racing from a Munster POV.
Edinburgh have gone for practically their full Category 1 side and brought back in Stuart McInally and Hamish Watson to their pack. Contextually, it makes a lot of sense for Richard Cockerill to load his side up like this given the way that Conference B falls at the moment. International commitments have meant that the Scarlets – currently second in the conference – have sent a heavily rotated side up to Ulster, while Connacht have a banker home game against the Southern Kings.
Munster, currently top of the group, are in the middle of a one week break between Racing and Sarries so, if you’re Richard Cockerill, this looks like the game to target. Edinburgh, currently third in the conference on points difference, know that a win away here would keep them in and around the top end of the Conference until at least the turn of the year given they play Glasgow twice and then the Southern Kings before the next break.
So four, or maybe five, points here would be a big get for Edinburgh and they’ve picked a side to do just that.
Bar Jamie Ritchie, John Barclay and WP Nel this is a fully loaded Edinburgh side and they pose a real threat to Munster’s current unbeaten run at home in general and Cork specifically.
To give you an idea of the challenge posed to Munster here, the only member of their starting pack that doesn’t have multiple test caps is their ultra-impressive loosehead prop Pierre Schoeman. They’ve got an all test midfield and fullback with Duhan Van Der Merwe and “The Sledgehammer” Eroni Sau.
Munster’s selection, on the other hand, reflects the context of the season. All of the international contingent have been rotated out with player welfare and the schedule of the next few weeks in mind. That means that much of the team that put us to the top of the conference have been selected here and, while this will be difficult, there’s no reason why we can’t do the job required.
Here are the teams.
Forget about Edinburgh’s recent results away from home in the PRO14.
Their two recent defeats in Treviso and Dublin were with heavily rotated squads so, for me, only their last two games in the Challenge Cup are relevant to us here. In the scrum, I don’t really see any way that we won’t be under pressure given the standard of opposition but that’s a manageable area of the game as long as we’re accurate on our own put-in. In the lineout, Ben Toolis is their primary counter-jumper but they have shown a slight tendency to be a little slow into the air on their more expansive launches to the tail without Barclay in their selection.
Mata, Bradbury and Watson are tertiary jumpers for them and if we want to compete on their launches we’ve got a decent chance of disrupting them at Four and Six. When they’re under pressure they’ll tend to go with Toolis at Four, despite their attempts at deception elsewhere. If we can pressure them here, we can generally get a lot of kickbacks from Pyrgos or Van Der Walt and Edinburgh do look a little leggy on kick transition to me, especially when Bill Mata has been in the backfield, as he is often.
From a phase play perspective, I actually think we’re a very decent matchup for this Edinburgh side. Sometimes they say that you’re better off without the ball but that definitely isn’t the case with this Edinburgh side. They have a lot of athletic ball-carrying weapons and two power wingers who allow them to extend their play really well – Sau and Van Der Merwe are serious physical threats in the wider channels with the ball in hand and, in particular, chasing after an angled grubber kick.
So hanging onto the ball will be vital against this Edinburgh side. We don’t need anything fancy here until the second and fourth quarter of this game where I’d expect a bit of a drop off in their forward coverage up the middle of the field.
One area that I’ve noticed on their defensive set up is a high, narrow press by their wingers and fullback on openside plays. Here’s a couple of examples;
Pyrgos or Van Der Walt often end up sweeping in behind the defensive line in these situations so, to fully take advantage of it, we’ll need to keep a live 3-2-1 forward shape on a big openside phase, much like here.
If we can bypass the forward defence, with the pullback to Healy, we’ll get a great look at bringing Daly into the line with Bennett and Van Der Merwe/Sau in front of him. From there, we’ll ideally have numbers outside to draw Kinghorn into the line so that we can attack Edinburgh through the carry – Bennett has a missed tackle or two in him – or kick through the line where we can attack the turning speed of Van Der Merwe/Kinghorn and get Nash running onto a bouncing ball with Pyrgos or Van Der Walt scrambling back.
This will be an incredibly difficult match but if we can manage our own possession, there should be a workable and notable drop off from Edinburgh at the end of each half.
