In an ideal world, very few of your forwards would ever need to pass the ball.

Why? Because in an ideal world, your forwards would win almost every collision they’d take on, eat up the gain line and then recycle to another forward who’d do the same before you get the backs involved to either finish off the opportunity or create another angle to punish the opposition phase for phase until they break.

Every pass that your forwards make is a risk but if you’ve got a negative one on one power differential – where the opposition is, for the most part, bigger/stronger than you – you have to take that risk so you can create better angles to attack and reduce the impact of a physical mismatch.

If you have a negative power differential, an average match up looks like this.

When you have when it’s purely one on one, decent footwork and pre-contact deception can usually find a soft shoulder and, with a good run onto the ball, you can accelerate into contact and increase your odds of winning the gain line. These are all trainable things.

But this kind of alignment rarely happens without making the opposition worry about the possibility that the ball will go beyond that one on one contest. Usually, you get scenarios like this, where your ball carrier runs into two defenders, at least initially, and then loses the collision.

Here are a few examples of this very thing from last weekend’s game.

Munster are losing two-on-one collisions here. Why? Because of the weather conditions, namely driving rain into the face, greasy conditions underfoot and on the ball, and the wind are limiting the added extras that Munster can put on the ball. Running onto the ball is all but impossible because of the greasy conditions, and footwork is limited in the rain. Murray’s passing range is affected by the same conditions with the wind being an added threat to both his range and accuracy.

But losing these collisions is nothing new. We haven’t really had any personnel changes from the semi-final last season so we knew that in one-on-one or two-on-one collisions against Saracens, we’d likely lose these contests.

So, to mitigate against a power differential, we want to add value to the carry by moving the ball pre or mid contact. That creates opportunities like this;

Exaggerated, yes, but it’s the basic principle – use tip on passes or offloads to manipulate the spacing of the opposition defence and create positive attacking lanes for your ball carriers off nine.

When Munster had conditions that allowed this kind of play, we were winning these collision points.

Look at the difference – pace, running onto the ball, hitting seams, burying fellas in the ruck at pace, and winning gain line.

This is the way that we want to play when conditions allow it. It’s not about waiting to play in perfect conditions, it’s mixing weather pragmatism with how you need to play to match up with the power athletes that Saracens have all through their squad, and in their front five in particular.

Heavy Hitter

Power athletes are gold in modern rugby. If you have enough of them, the game of rugby becomes incredibly simple. The only problem is, the very best ones are expensive to contract and, from an academy perspective, don’t come along very often.

If we define “power athletes” and power as it pertains to athletic performance as “the ability to exert a maximal force in as short a time as possible, as in accelerating, jumping and throwing implements …  While strength is the maximal force you can apply against a load, power is proportional to the speed at which you can apply this maximal force”.

If you have four or five top-end power athletes in your pack, then you can pretty much play whatever way you want to. Defining “power athletes” is quite difficult without access to training data but you can perform something of an eye test. There are different levels of power athlete – test level and elite club level – and the more test level guys you have, the better you’ll do for the most part. Leinster and Saracens, for example, have a tonne of power athletes dotted throughout their packs and it’s no surprise to see them appearing near the top of European rugby almost every year since they’ve developed or contracted those players.

Mako Vunipola, Tadhg Furlong, Andrew Porter, Maro Itoje, Billy Vunipola, Rhys Ruddock, James Ryan, Jamie George, Cian Healy, Vincent Koch, Will Skelton, George Kruis, Titi Lamositele, Michael Rhodes and even developing players Caelan Doris, Ben Earl, Rhys Carré, and Ronán Kelleher would fall into that power athlete category, if not now then certainly as they develop with age.

When you have these types of players in your pack, you can play with an element of segmentation between forwards and backs. When I’ve watched Leinster, Saracens and, to an extent, Racing 92 play at full strength, I’ve noticed this segmentation between forwards possession and backs possession.

Here’s a fairly typical Leinster attacking sequence;

Forward phase, forward phase, expansive backs phase. Both of the two forward phases had zero deception on the carry but still got over the gainline. Why? A dominant physical advantage. Cian Healy trucks up the first phase with Andrew Porter burying the Saints tackler after the contact. The next phase is James Ryan running onto the ball and breaking tackles.

We can see Ronán Kelleher acting as a decoy option in midfield to help the backs play ball but you don’t really see Leinster sticking forwards into wider pod formations because they don’t need to. Why would you risk an expansive move where a heavy forward has to time onto the ball or give a pass at high pace himself when they can just win gain line up the middle of the field off nine?

You’ll see Kelleher – or Van Der Flier or Doris – rotating into wider formations like this as an option/decoy carrier but you mostly see Leinster’s forwards laying out across the pitch in almost a flat formation.

This is consistent across their performances this season in the Champions Cup and a consistent feature of their attacking phases against Northampton, in particular. In the above instance, Leinster got turned over but you got a great example as to how this approach works in the build-up to it.

Kelleher trucks it up first, with Toner and Ruddock burying the next ruck and the next phase to Porter is let down by a slightly inaccurate clean from Doris.

You don’t really see the Leinster forwards passing to each other unless they have a particular advantage in doing so. My point is that they don’t really need to. Not everyone in their pack or replacements is a power carrier either. Toner, Fardy and Van Der Flier certainly aren’t but it doesn’t matter when you have guys like Ruddock, Healy, Furlong/Porter and Ryan with Kelleher and Doris growing into the role as they develop.

The individual power of their primary carriers creates space and allows their backs to play in the secondary layer as almost a separate unit entirely.

Here’s a good example.

Leinster cycle through their power forwards in the centre of the field while the backs assess the angles created and wait for an opportunity to be released. The structure created by the forwards allows space for the backs to make plays in space.

In a lot of ways, Leinster don’t need to move their forwards into wider formations because they, as a carrying unit, are capable of bossing possession between the 15m lines between each other, commit defenders and then give the halfbacks the space to make good release decisions.

Munster can’t play this way against top-level teams because, to be frank, we just don’t have the players for it.

Our interplay between forwards – and I’ve gone into detail on this over the past few months – is to mitigate against that lack of top-end power on the whole when compared with Saracens, Leinster and perhaps Racing 92. When we have come undone against all of these teams in big games, it has been our ability to consistently move the ball up the field through the forwards that has let us down.

When forward interplay works, it’s almost impossible to consistently defend against but it’s harder and riskier to pull off. When it comes down to the decision of how you play in open play, almost everything is dictated by the number of power athletes you have in your pack. If it’s less than four, you need to expand. If it’s more than four, you can play with less risk, more structure and allow the expansive stuff to come when your structure breaks the opposition or on transition.