[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]L[/su_dropcap]einster are either one of the best sides in Europe, or they are a side that you fling the ball around against without any penalty. They cannot be both. A lot of has been made of Munster’s box kicking tactics for the first three-quarters of this game and, at the same time, our disappointing ball carrying performance in the forwards but I would posit that the former is a direct response to the predictable nature of the latter. That is to say, our difficulty in carrying the ball against this Leinster pack was eminently predictable before the game to the point that our game plan would have been shaped to mitigate for that shortcoming and then look to attack.

When we consider a game plan for a specific contest against a specific opponent, you have to include your own weaknesses as a key thing to avoid. For Munster, it would be the ability of our front five carrying the ball off #9 and our ability to compress a fresh Leinster side inside the first five defenders off the ruck so our game-plan would revolve around avoiding that scenario unless you are deep in the Leinster 22 or if you’ve got good momentum in the second and fourth quarters.

Of course, it’s impossible to go through a game without resetting off #9 or using a few short carries to progress into an area of the field you can work with, but we did not have a front five selection that, in my opinion, could regularly exert enough gravity over Leinster to make playing more expansively a realistic option until later in the 80 minutes.

What do I mean by “exerting gravity”?

Every player exerts an influence on the spacing of the opposition defence relative to where they are lined up on the pitch. A guy like Billy Vunipola lining up in a pod of three off #9 exerts huge gravity on the opposition because he’s incredibly powerful in contact – as you’d expect for a guy who’s 120kg and well able to accelerate into contact – but he’s also capable of offloading and passing the ball to a screened runner or tip-on. He demands a two+ tackle every time he hits the line but it’s not just him, it’s the combined threat of Billy Vunipola plus Mako Vunipola, Vincent Koch, Jamie George and, pre-salary cap breakup, Will Skelton and Maro Itoje.

All of those players exert gravity on the teams that defend them and that gravity holds defenders in place to make playing more expansively. For much of the last two seasons, Munster have been missing tight five forwards who have this kind of ball-carrying gravity.

This sequence from the Saracens game earlier in the season will illustrate this principle.

What are we doing here? We’re looking for position in our own Q2 during a game where we can’t box kick easily because the weather conditions – a strong wind blowing right to left – make it all but impossible to gain any territory from that tactic. This kind of phase play is the kind of scenario that Munster wants to avoid if at all possible. We’re getting dominated on the gain line and struggling to generate any kind of useful possession.

Remember the principles that Stephen Larkham espoused during the offseason, as detailed in this article;

“Roughly, it’s just playing with momentum. So, if we haven’t got momentum we don’t want to be putting ourselves under pressure by continuing to hold onto the ball. We don’t want to muck around with the ball when the opposition is in a dominant position.”

When the defence is in a dominant position – superior numbers and width in their primary line – we will kick rather than burn dead carries by holding onto the ball.

So, when you see the headline number of 12 Conor Murray box kicks, it’s with this principle in mind. We kick when we have lost momentum, do not look like gaining momentum or if the defence have superior numbers relative to the attacking shape we have available.

When we map Murray’s kicks, we see a familiar pattern.

Seven of his kicks came in our Q2 in the aftermath of a few burned phases and the clear absence of any kind of forward momentum.

Five of his kicks came outside the Leinster 10m line after similar momentum losses. A lot was made of his decision to kick in these moments, but they came at the end of burned carrying phases or obvious defensive superiority. Sometimes Murray made the decision to kick quite quickly but the principle of “do we have momentum on this phase” dictated his thought process.

On this example, Scannell makes the decision to attack the gainline on a swivel pass from Cloete and then loses the collision with Byrne.

Murray decides to kick the next phase because the rest of our forwards were in the maul and Leinster had Kelleher and Connors stacked on the openside of the ruck along with Sexton, Henshaw and Ringrose.

This is just one example. Have a look at this.

First, Loughman steps out on Porter and gives up an angle that collapses our scrum and sends the ball out the back. Farrell does really well on the cutback but watch the next phase.

O’Donoghue gets stopped by Henshaw and then McGrath on the next phase when we have an opportunity to double up on Farrell’s good work. Leinster aren’t concerned with attacking the breakdown in any real way but we still lose three forwards securing the ruck.

Regardless, we got a positive return on the next carry after Peter O’Mahony beat Jack Conan for a positive gain but Leinster still file around the contact point and flood the blindside.

De Allende does well against Ringrose and makes decent ground in a congested channel. From here, with a big openside position to work with, we need to see some direction from #10.  We want shapes, depth and organisation of assets.

JJ is wiping behind Stander’s carry but we’re not seeing huge amounts of structure-forming off the carry point. From there, we cannot exert any gravity on Leinster’s defence.

Archer is decisively stopped by Porter in a one-man stop – albeit after Murray broke rhythm at the base of the ruck – and we lose two men to the ruck trying to clean him out. Scannell gets stopped by Conan relatively easy with Healy assisting. All momentum has drained from our attack at this point and this passage eventually ends with a passive kick through by Hanrahan as the play swung back. Leinster are pretty comfortable defending this kind of forward progression. You could look for a tip on pass or a pullback – if the call came from behind the screen – but Leinster were stopping our setups with one/two defenders and we were losing collisions and numbers to rucks that Leinster weren’t contesting.

Does a tip on to O’Mahony from Stander here advance our position?

I’m not sure, to be honest. I think Leinster are pretty comfortable here. You might say that a call from #10 to pull this back so that we could maybe look at putting Beirne one on one with Healy is an option. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t called because Hanrahan isn’t animating for the ball as the carry develops.

There’s a brief moment where Beirne has a look at hitting a line as he did for his try against Connacht but Murray can’t get hands on the ball quickly enough.

It came to nothing. Time after time, we saw Leinster stop (and sometimes rip) our forward ball carriers when we went looking for a platform. If you don’t threaten the opposition off #9, nothing binds them in place for when you try to move the ball beyond #10. They don’t stop moving just because you’ve passed the ball.

Why not play the ball wide? Start flinging it around? Because there was no space to throw to given the way Leinster defended. They weren’t contesting most of the rucks with any more than the one or two defenders that were in the collision. That meant they consistently had 13 defenders in the primary defensive line with ample backfield coverage.

We were losing more numbers to our collisions than they were, so bar hitting that middle link point – remember the 3-2-2 Japanese schemes in the Red Eye? – with tight calls off #10, we were running into brick walls. A tip on isn’t going to change that when Leinster are set like this and neither is a deeper, move wide when Leinster have stacked numbers there and no reason to overcommit to our screen line off #9.

So what do you do?

We tried to run a few deep blindside plays but that relied on selling Leinster on possible decoys from Billy Holland and Jeremy Loughman.

Porter and Connors do not buy the threat of Holland’s option line – despite his excellent animation.

Loughman isn’t a threat for a pass from JJ as he’s ahead of him and not animating for the ball but I think he’s is running a chopping line on the defender inside Connors – Andrew Porter. Loughman wants to bump and stall Porter to create a lane for Earls to cut back into.

Earls makes a good step across Henshaw but Connors gets a hand on Earls and it’s enough for a stop. If RG Snyman is running Holland’s decoy line, I think Connors sticks in place to make it out to the blindside but RG Snyman is out for months.

Munster box kicked to unsettle a Leinster defence that, while they were fresh, would comfortably deal with our forward set up.

When Shane Daly won an aerial duel with Lowe and we retained possession, we earned a picture that we had been looking for all game. Leinster are clustered at the ruck, key defenders are out of position and O’Mahony – a good passer – is at the base of the ruck.

This is one of the windows were looking for and that the box kick at weaker aerial jumpers like Lowe was designed to produce. At this point, we need to see (a) Jeremy Loughman screaming for a tip-on pass to attack the space left by Andrew Porter with his back turned or (b) Rory Scannell demanding the ball on a pull-back to release CJ Stander with Damian De Allende and Chris Farrell outside him.

We get neither. Beirne gets double tackled by Connors and Baird. He gets driven back 5 metres.

Rory Scannell wipes across the back of the ruck because he either hadn’t seen the massive gap on the outside or he has and he doesn’t feel he can unlock it.

CJ Stander seems a little perplexed as to why he didn’t see the ball here.

Or maybe I’m projecting.

Murray box kicked off this dramatically lost collision – all the momentum was gone – and Munster won a penalty off the kick receipt at the breakdown before it was reversed for contact in the air.

This is what I mean when I said that the box kicking wasn’t the problem, it was what came after.

We kicked to pressure Leinster and when we got a break, a window of opportunity, we consistently shied away from making the play we needed to. If you’re giving up a physical advantage against a bigger defence, you don’t burn yourself playing empty phases in your own half – you box kick to run an opponent that’s lacking match sharpness and then go after them when they transition to their forward replacements.

And then you work your set-piece strike moves to bring your physical advantage in midfield to bear. You’ve got to have a stable scrum platform and a reliable lineout. Our scrum has been pretty good over the last two weeks but it dipped here. Our lineout, too, was well below standard.

Leinster targeted Holland repeatedly at the lineout and got a huge return on key launch points for us.

Again, we were playing small ball at the lineout trying to throw off Toner and Fardy but we were a little sluggish here, I feel. When we got good scrum position late in the game, I felt we limited ourselves. When Scannell replaced Conway, Farrell moved out to the wing on this play and when we screen De Allende off the scrum, Leinster defended Scannell way too easily.

Of all the options available here – (inside ball to JJ, outside pop to Daly on the crash into Ringrose, pull back to Earls coming around the corner on Lowe) – Scannell picked the worst one which was just crashing up into Byrne and Henshaw for minimal gain.

Let’s back ourselves to make the pass here when Leinster are tiring. Let’s have a crack when we have the position and we have options. I wrote before the game that you won’t beat Leinster without ambition. After our kicking plan to pressure them in the backfield and limit their attacking scope worked and their heavy hitters in the front five departed, we had a window to hit them on kick transition and off the set-piece but we didn’t manage it.

We have a new season coming in three weeks. This kind of thing will only show up against Leinster in the PRO14. As disappointing as we were against Leinster on Friday, I think we’d have beaten most other sides in the tournament but Leinster have two incredibly strong packs they can field and, without Kleyn, Kilcoyne and Snyman, we struggled to play with the size you need to compete with them with ball in hand.

The target now has to be pushing guys like Knox, Salanoa, Ahern, Kelly, O’Connor (when fit), Josh Wycherley and others who might have the physical profile to drive us on so when we get those injured guys back, we’ve got difficult decision to make. Until that changes, then nothing will change.