When Leinster lose two big knockout games in quick succession, it is of national concern to Irish Rugby. That is because Ireland and Leinster are more or less the same entity at this stage in 2022. The personnel is more or less the same in both squads, the core concepts of the game are so similar as to be identical and Ireland and Leinster win and lose games for the same core reasons almost every single time.

Look at the Leinster match day squad that took on La Rochelle in Marseilles a few weeks ago. Now imagine the Irish side that will take on the All Blacks in a few weeks. How many slots in that match day 23 aren’t definitively taken up by a current Leinster player?

By my count, it’s probably six on the bench and just two in the starting XV with Kelleher injured and 5/3 bench split so that leaves the following positions open to guys who don’t currently play for Leinster.

• Right Wing
• Loosehead/Tighthead Lock
• Replacement Hooker – for this tour.
• Replacement Tighthead
• Replacement Lock
• Replacement Backrow
• Replacement Scrumhalf
• Replacement Flyhalf

If this is the way that it is – and I think it is – then Andy Farrell, Mike Catt and the coaching unit would be mad to depart too radically from what the bulk of this starting selection is doing at a successful Leinster side. Look at the plaudits Leinster have received all season long for attacking rugby, being four in a row URC winners and, despite not winning the Heineken Cup since 2018, being “the best team in Europe”? That sounds snarky, I know that, but I’m trying to get across the thought process that a guy like Farrell might employ here. Leinster are perceived to be the best team in Europe right now whether their success in Europe reflects that or not. When Farrell started to select Leinster’s starting side practically en-masse since 2021, Ireland’s performances in the Autumn Nations Series and this year’s Six Nations were radically better than what had come before.

From the era post-2019 World Cup to Six Nations 2021, there was a real feeling of unease around Farrell’s tenure. Ireland were winning the games we’d typically expect to win and losing the games we looked at as benchmarks – namely against England and France. The last game before the coronavirus shut down the world was Ireland losing comprehensively away to England in Twickenham. Our next game away to France in October 2020 saw us lose heavily to France in Paris before losing away to England again two weeks later.

At the start of the 2021 Six Nations a few months later, we lost to Wales in Llanelli, lost to France at home a week later, and picked up the usual win over Italy before scraping to an away win over Scotland in Edinburgh. The next game against England was really important because another loss there and you could argue that Andy Farrell’s job was in real jeopardy, four-year contract or not.

Instead, Ireland won incredibly well and went on a huge run over the following summer, beat the All Blacks in November and won a Triple Crown in the 2022 Six Nations. Sure, Ireland were beaten comprehensively away to France but the win over England smoothed over that bump in the road.

As Ireland’s performances improved in that 18-month period, Leinster’s representation in the team went up. Sure, that was helped by Andrew Porter’s switch to loosehead and the emergence of Dan Sheehan but if you’re Andy Farrell, I’m sure you’d look at how pairing the Leinster front row, four of the Leinster back five, Leinster’s starting halfbacks and regularly selecting at least three Leinster players out of a possible five in the outside backs had been beneficial to Ireland’s general performance in that time.

Why is that considered a benefit? Well, they’re all great players obviously but most T1 test sides have great players so why would it lead to an uptick in performance? Cohesion. I know I’ve gone on about this a lot but you cannot underestimate the value of the bulk of your side playing and training alongside each other for most of the season at Ireland and then Leinster. What would disrupt this cohesion? Playing a radically different style to what the bulk of your starting XV plays for the bulk of the season at Leinster. There’s no good reason to do it so, when you already have an established relationship with the key driver behind that way of playing – Stuart Lancaster – why not double down on what works? The biggest issue that faces most test sides outside of World Cups is getting enough time together on the field to make the coach’s vision for the team work on any practical level. The longer you train together and play together, the easier it is to build complexity into your game.

For much of the past Six Nations, Eddie Jones had to stitch together a game plan that would work with players from eight different Premiership clubs regularly in his matchday squad and seven in his starting XV. Fabien Galthie had to find a framework that would easily suit the players from nine different clubs that regularly took part in his matchday squad and eight in his starting XV. That’s players coming from multiple different attacking frameworks one week to a singular test plan the next.

When Eddie Jones said of Andy Farrell’s Ireland side earlier this year that…

“[Ireland] are literally, and I say this without any hesitation, the most cohesive side in the world.

“The bulk of their team train together for the bulk of the year.

“So they are very well-coordinated in their attack, they are very structured, they’re very sequenced in set plays. And they’re tough around the breakdown.

… he was talking about the inherent advantages that come with having the team set up that Ireland have had for the last year or more. Andy Farrell’s Ireland side in 2022 doesn’t have to do half as much “onboarding” as our two chief Six Nations rivals – England and France – have to do to get fully up to speed and that is an advantage, no two ways about it.

But for every advantage it gives you, there’s a downside that you have to be willing to pay and, for Ireland and Andy Farrell, it’s being the most analysed test side in the game bar none.

If you were to put it to both Farrell and Lancaster about the framework synergy between Leinster and Ireland, I think they’d probably play down the similarities but, as I stated in the opening paragraph, Ireland and Leinster win and lose games for the same core reasons almost every single time.

The first similarity is Leinster and Ireland’s kicking game. You might say, Leinster kicked the most and farthest in the URC and Ireland kicked the fewest amount of times and the shortest in the 2022 Six Nations – isn’t that completely different? Yes, it is, but when you boil down the average number of metres Ireland and Leinster kick per game, you start to see the hidden machinery of the framework.

In 2021/22, Leinster kicked the ball 23 times per game for 679m in the URC, on average.

In the last Six Nations, Ireland kicked the ball 25 times per game for 691m, on average.

There’s very little difference there and it shows the same approach. Ireland, like Leinster, are primarily a counter-transition team and they use the same kicking strategy to produce the same schemed scenarios for the same reasons.

A counter-transition is when the team in possession voluntarily surrenders the ball by kicking long downfield from anywhere inside their own 10m line (or off a managed set-piece position) with the aim of receiving the ball back in an advantageous, “flow” position where you can make a clean linebreak if there’s space, go for a 50/22, start off a structured quick ball sequence or kick the ball again to further stress the cardio of the opposition and increase the chance of an even more advantageous flow position on the next ruck. If the opposition doesn’t kick the ball back to you, your chasers funnel the transition runner into your heavy traffic in the middle of the field where they will get hit and tracked across the defensive line, counter-rucked and pressured into kicking from a weaker position and then the flow position starts all over again.

In short, it works like this;

 

How does this relate to test rugby if everyone else in the Six Nations kicks longer than Ireland? Because Ireland and Leinster’s strategy works regardless of the change in level from club to test rugby – mostly. Leinster might kick longer than everyone at club level but that is irrelevant to other test sides kicking longer than Ireland. Part of a longer kicking game at test level is to simplify your structures. France, for example, play a modified form of kick pressure that amplifies their particular physical and strategic advantages.

Ireland kick way less than them because we have a built-in strategy coming from the club game that doesn’t really need to be adapted because the bulk of the side are already familiar with it so instead of kicking long to simplify the game, Ireland can kick relatively shorter than other test sides to build on complexity.

The only issue is that other sides are now very well aware of this. Much has been made of “hurting Leinster at the breakdown” as being a core strategy in beating them and it’s true but it’s also very vague. What rucks do you attack in general? How do you attack them? What part of Leinster’s game is most vulnerable to that kind of attack?

Teams like La Rochelle and the Bulls have shown us that attacking Leinster with a mixture of traditional poaching and choke tackling is a good way to upset Leinster but when do you do this? On the counter-transition. The Bulls were generally really good at returning Leinster’s attempts at counter-transition position play by holding onto the ball in the same way that La Rochelle did – which keeps Leinster on the back foot and pressures their possession the next time – but also by matching Leinster’s kicking in a way that often drove Leinster right back where they came from and put the counter-transition territorial pressure back on guys like O’Brien, Byrne and Larmour. When Leinster attacked on the counter-transition to go heavy on their quick-ruck ball plays, the Bulls were ready and were really clever in what rucks they targeted. By staying patient on those counter-transition sequences, the Bulls inverted Leinster’s usual advantage by stressing their cardio mid-sequence and getting success targeting the offensive breakdown and stressing Leinster’s passing efficiency.

You can see the same principle in effect here from this long, non-contestable box kick exit that was deliberately kept in-field by the Bulls. Look at the stress that the first ruck after the run-back is under and how stretched Leinster are to clear it.

McCarthy makes the error under pressure but he snatched at the opportunity to offload anyway as Leinster didn’t really have a structure to work with.

In the end, Leinster were reduced to booting the ball long off restarts to try and find something in the Bulls’ transition defence but they got nothing until the result was beyond doubt.

The Bulls knew why Leinster kicked, didn’t get sucked in by it and showed the All Blacks what will be possible this summer.

Why is this a problem for Ireland? Because La Rochelle and the Bulls have shown that if you refuse to get sucked in by Leinster and Ireland’s kicking game gambit, you can actually invert the pressure it exerts back on us by making our possession more expensive. The slowest ruck ball Ireland had all year in the Six Nations against France and not just because they are physically huge men but because their very conservative kicking game in response to our attempts to play counter-transition inverted the pressure we expected to put on them back on us.

How the All Blacks attack this area of Ireland/Leinster’s game will be incredibly interesting. How will Andy Farrell and Mike Catt adjust it to shore it up? That’ll be even more interesting.

In the next part of this two part mini-series, I’ll look at the parallels between Ireland and Leinster’s set-piece game and how the Bulls game could be more problematic in the long run than any other game this season.