“Just win, baby.”
Al Davis, the owner of the then LA Raiders, first uttered those words in public during a pretty tense presser in the aftermath of a Superbowl win. They became iconic with the Raiders and Al Davis from then on. Those words are, in my opinion, the boiled-down essence of every conversation we have around aesthetics in the game of rugby union.
When I looked up “Just Win, Baby” I found a great quote on a site called Narrative Science that I feel is so relevant to the situation Munster finds itself in right now I had to include it.
‘Just win’, means that you have to stop telling yourself lies about the reasons you are or are not winning. It means no f’ing excuses. No bullshit. Don’t rationalize away your losses. Just win, baby.
When we talk about aesthetics in this game, we’re really talking about winning and losing and our methods for understanding both. Results are objective. Style is subjective. At the moment, for example, Leicester Tigers are on a historic run in the Gallagher Premiership. They have won 11 games in a row, have the best defence in the competition and they have managed all of that by kicking the ball more than anyone, carrying the ball on average less than everyone else and passing the ball less than everyone in the league bar one.
Are Leicester fans complaining about the rugby on show? That they mainly base their attack around the lineout and maul? That they kick the leather off the ball? No. Why? Because they are winning games and winning them well. On the evidence of this first half of the season, that Tigers side will take some stopping in England at least and would have to be favourites to lift the title in 2022.
When you’re winning, it mostly doesn’t matter how you win, just that you win. The Springboks of 2019 to this past summer had the entire rugby world telling them that they were killing the sport with their style of play but did Springbok fans care? Hell no. They remember the two seasons between 2016 to late 2017 when they tried to expand their attacking play under Allister Coetzee. They won only 44% of their games during that 25 game spell, fell to 7th in the World Rankings at one stage and ate a number of humiliating losses to the All Blacks, Autralia, Ireland, and others including a dour loss away to Italy. They were trying to expand their attacking game – to evolve beyond what we thought we knew about Springbok rugby – but it didn’t get a chance to play out. The fans didn’t care about the aesthetics of what Coetzee was trying to achieve because the scoreboards were way too ugly to stomach.
Rassie Erasmus came in, turned the Springboks into the kick pressure monsters we came to know from 2018 on and the results started to flow from there. Then came the trophies. The rugby wasn’t pretty – unless you like big scrums and big mauls – but it was hyper-effective and I challenge you to find one Springbok fan who would want the Boks to move away from their primary style, even if it meant losing a few games they really wanted to win to get there.
On the other side of the coin, Harlequins won the Gallagher Premiership last season playing a style of swashbuckling attacking rugby that was the talk of world rugby for a spell and went a long way to shooting their flyhalf, Marcus Smith, onto a Lions tour ahead of Johnny Sexton.
Bristol, a side with a reputation for playing some of the most expansive rugby in Europe, would be rooted to the foot of the Gallagher Premiership table if it wasn’t for a historically awful Bath side. The tide hasn’t started to turn against Pat Lam yet – no relegation in the Gallagher Premiership this season will keep the wolves from the door there – but if Bristol are still losing games at this rate this time next season, how long will it be before talk turns to bringing a guy in who’s going to tighten things up? If Bristol hired Jake White and he had them playing a form of heavy kick pressure, do you think he’d be safe in his gig after their outlay with 3 wins in 11?
I don’t think so.
I suppose my main question is “is playing attractive rugby enough on it’s own when you’re not winning anything”?
In the last few years, style for style’s sake seems to have taken hold in the general media environment as a sort of consolation prize in the event you don’t win the games that really matter. That has a lot to do with the democratisation of rugby analysis and the prevalence of sharing clips and GIFs of good play on social media. The likes your team gets on social media for sizzle clips, the puff pieces pre-game, the perception of being 🔥🔥🔥 baller merchants can insulate you from criticism after losses more than even trophies can.
Japan, for example, have been thoroughly worked out by the elite sides since the relative ambush of Shizuoka 2019 and have lost game after game since. In reality, they were smashed by the first serious team they met in that World Cup, it’s just that Ireland weren’t at that level at that stage of Schmidt’s term. When Japan beat you, you should be playing like them. When you beat them – silence.
Connacht are a great example of this and Munster, this weekend just gone, are another. On Saturday, neither Connacht nor Munster played well. Munster played quite a bit worse than Connacht – to put it mildly – but despite only passing the ball 45 times, carrying it 59 times and kicking it 28 times compared to Connachts’ 170 passes, 139 carries and 21 kicks we were a missed penalty away from edging that game 11-10, even if everything else stayed exactly the same. Connacht’s winning try came from a close-range maul drive in the aftermath of a silly Munster yellow card penalty that should have been a red card.
What would the perception be like on Sunday if the margins swing the other way? Would we be talking about how Connacht threw 9 offloads, beat 17 defenders, got 3 clean line breaks but still didn’t manage to break down the Munster defence? That they were naive in possession? No. We’d be talking about how Munster cheesed a win without throwing a shot.
Connacht aren’t expected to win anything serious so a few InterPro wins and playing Nice Rugby that gets fans and pundits excited is considered a big enough win in the grand scheme of things, at least for now. So when they, or any other team with a perceived expansive style, do lose it’s almost an expected side effect of their ambition.
When you lose while playing ultra-conservative rugby, as Munster did, you get dumped on, almost rightly so, because you have boiled down the essence of the game – min-mixed it – at the expense of the spectacle of the game in an attempt to earn the win, but lost all the same. It’s like counting cards in blackjack but losing anyway.
You generate no sympathy and, in reality, you don’t deserve it anyway.
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I don’t think that Munster are a “kick pressure” team, enough to the point that I’d describe the approach to the Connacht game at the weekend as something of an aberration.
A lot of what I’ve read in my mentions since Saturday night has been that this game was somehow emblematic of Munster over the last few years but I’m not sure that’s accurate, at least against everyone bar Leinster since Autumn 2020. Even this season, it wasn’t so long ago that everyone and their dog was talking about Munster’s “evolution” in the aftermath of big wins over the Sharks, Stormers and Scarlets.
I think the main issue is that it’s hard to actually say what kind of a team Munster are at the moment. Think of Leinster, think of Connacht, think of Ulster, think of Toulouse, think of La Rochelle, think of Leicester, think of Exeter, think of Saracens, think of Harlequins, think of Bristol – what do you see? With each club name, you get a picture in your mind of a style. Rightly or wrongly, you know how those teams will approach the vast, vast majority of their games. They have an on-pitch identity that you can immediately tie to them and understand their approach.
One of the main criticisms that I’ve seen of Van Graan is that he doesn’t have a way of playing that is easily tagged as Van Graan’s style so the worst part of Munster’s worst performances on the biggest days gets apportioned to him. That’s usually Conor Murray or Craig Casey box kicking.
Munster don’t really have a distinct style. We’re not a box kicking team anymore – despite what Saturday looked like – but we’re not a massively effective counter-attacking team either. We’re not a team that bosses possession, we’re not a team that’s got a massively dominant set-piece. We’re not the biggest team out there physically, certainly with RG Snyman out for the season (again) and Jason Jenkins permanently picking up knocks. We’re not a team built to play small-ball like Connacht or Scarlets, either.
So what are we?
I think we are a team in Van Graan’s image as a rugby mind. We are a chimaera. A hybrid of many qualities, without necessarily being a European leader in any of them bar, maybe, our defence. Van Graan understands the game deeply as an analyst. As a coach, I think that translates into a team that is usually incredibly prepared for the opposition’s strengths and quite set up to attack those. Munster’s kick heavy approach against Leinster in the PRO14 semi-final of 2019/20 was laughed at post-game but was duplicated by Saracens to great success a week later.
If it seems like Munster fluctuate week to week depending on the opposition I think it’s because of this reactive, shape-shifting, intellectual quality that Van Graan has. It’s often easier to define Munster’s style by how we play certain opponents. We reflect their strengths with our approach more often than not. When it’s Peak Leinster or another “big” side that we give up a power differential to, we tend to kick a lot. When it’s a mid-level opponent we can do any number of things but we rarely play a mid-level opponent when it comes to knock out rugby so, really, what value is it?
If you look at our measurables during a season, we’re usually middle of the pack for linebreaks, offloads, metres gained, and kicking because of this chimaeric approach.
Our scrum is middle of the pack too but we’re one of the best lineout teams across both competitions. Are we actually a lineout maul team? I think that’s a fair enough description, actually. Most of our best work most of the time comes from that platform and when we have “bad days at the office” it’s when that platform is taken away from us, either in the air or on the ground.
To be completely fair to Van Graan, I think he’s been deeply unlucky when it comes to the size and power he’s tried to sign repeatedly so that Munster can be more proactive with that lineout maul platform. From a maul perspective, I think we punch above our weight pretty consistently but the injury to RG Snyman and the constant niggles suffered by Jason Jenkins have reduced our top level power there and our effectiveness has reduced with it as a result.
A maul that goes forward most of the time is a lethal weapon when it comes to scoring tries directly and creating indirect options off the maul. Damian De Allende combined with a maul that goes forward means you have a tool that can crack any defence open – and I mean any defence. With options like RG Snyman, Gavin Coombes, Chris Farrell and others coming around the corner, that becomes a lethal building block that you can build most of your attack around.
When you understand this, you understand the hiring of Stephen Larkham, who’s Brumbies side were the maul dominant team in Super Rugby for a number of years and got to a Super Rugby final off the back of that platform to the point they felt laws were changed to make them less effective.
So yes, our attack has expanded, in so much that we’ve doubled down on our maul platform and options off it radiating out for a few extra phases. Elements of our attacking phase play outside of starter play and post-starter play states has expanded with it, to a degree, but the disruption post October would affect the implementation of those strategies in the last two full games – against Castres and Connacht – the hardest.
Watching the Connacht game back four times – once live, once for first review, once for the clip run and then once for the breakdown metrics – showed me a picture of a side that tried to double down on the maul as a counter-punch platform but couldn’t get any purchase against a committed Connacht defence.
I think if Jenkins had been fit, he’d have made a massive difference in that area alone to the point that his pre-game knock mid-week was a critical blow to what we intended to do in that game. With a slightly under-weight maul, our launching options were reduced, our capacity for inflicting dominant psychological blows on the opponents decreased and the chance of receiving psychological blows in the form of close range stops increased. Why did we tap and go multiple 5m penalties? I think getting scragged and stopped on a big maul platform earlier in that half played a large part in that decision making process.
From a stylistic perspective, the new coaches will have to make a decision to either double down on the maul and the radiating phases off it (which might be a difficult re-shaping in the post De Allende area) or move to a system that focuses on that other facets of the game where possession can be schemed. No successful side can have a sub-elite lineout or maul, that is non-negotiable, but your manner of attacking off that platform can be schemed for, like anything else.
Our new coaching unit will have to work out what exactly our attacking priorities are. Quins use Andre Esterhuizen as a key building block for their attack off scrum and lineout, so do Munster need to do similar? Will that be Chris Farrell, who’s also out of contract this season? Or will we move to a more complex dual playmaker system that will focus more on kick transition or phase points while, obviously, retaining a solid launch platform as a base standard?
