[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]C[/su_dropcap]ontinuity is a word you hear a lot when it comes to squad building and success in rugby and it’s most successfully applied with equal levels of cohesion. The very best sides have a lot of top quality, familiar combinations through their team that, in turn, develop an elite level of cohesion with other units in the side. If this cohesive unit is given continuity – unbroken and consistent operation of something over time – then they are incrementally more likely to win big games and deliver consistent results.

Cohesion + Continuity = The Gold Standard.

Getting those two elements right usually puts you on the right path if you’ve got the right people in place and it’s what every sports organisation is looking for.

Cohesion is built by identifying who your top players are and/or who they’re going to be within two seasons and then playing them together as a unit consistently. At an elite level, this will be finding out who your CORE 1 and FOUNDATION players are and backing them up with your SQUAD 2 and PRIORITY 2/3 players.

Continuity is built by ensuring these top players are contracted en-masse in staggered blocks (to ensure you don’t have a massive group of your best players coming up for contract renewal at the same time) and that you have consistent coaching, development and recruitment in place for 3+ seasons.

Continuity, as described here, is probably the most difficult one to attain in rugby because it deals with getting the right Director of Rugby and their coaches in place to manage the team cohesion but you’ll only really know if they’ve been a success after three or more seasons.

Without the benefit of a time machine, you can’t know if a DOR/Head Coach will work out, especially if they have no prior connection with the setup. That’s why there’s such a preference to promote from within if at all possible. That’s what Ireland did when planning the succession to Schmidt, what Leinster did when they were replacing Matt O’Connor and what Munster did when they were replacing Kidney in 2008 – they promoted a senior “lieutenant” to Head Coach/DOR.

There’s an inherent logic to it. The assistant already knows who the CORE 1 and FOUNDATION players are and what style of rugby brings the best out of those players. If they’ve been at the club for a decent length of time, they’ll also be aware of the contracting cycles, any difficult characters, high potential players coming up in the academy or below and they’ll have areas where they felt their previous boss might have missed. When you appoint Andy Farrell to the head coach role, you do so in part because of how much he already knows and how they might use that insight to build on the continuity that’s already in place.

When you appoint someone from outside with no previous connection to the club, you do so because there isn’t a stand-out candidate at the club already or because the upper management feels like it’s time for a shift in approach.

There’s no one size fits all approach to this because there are as many examples of a new broom working out perfectly as there are complete busts. It entirely depends on the talent available and what the best decision looks like with all the available information in front of you.

Any new coach who comes in usually does so with a clean slate but also with a pragmatic idea that changing everything that a team does overnight is a difficult enough proposition. Rob Penney took a fair bit of criticism for radically altering Munster’s style of play in 2013/14 but given the manner of Munster’s performances the previous season, you could argue that radical change was probably needed. By the end of Penney’s term, his style and approach were praised by Paul O’Connell.

“I think New Zealand play a very similar framework to the way we play at the moment, albeit they are probably a little bit more effective at it than we are. One thing I noticed when I saw them playing about a year and a half ago was the subtlety in how they did it. We were probably lacking a lot of that early this season, but I think it’s gotten better and better.

“There have obviously been some days where we were very poor and you’d ask yourself was this working. There are other days when we’ve been really good and you can really see the merits of it. I know Edinburgh last weekend wouldn’t have been the toughest opposition we’ve ever played… But very often after Heineken Cup defeats, we’ve gone off and played games and had to really slog to win. Yet the framework we had in place last week allowed us to score tries at will.

“There are times when it’s really, really effective, so I think we’ve all learned a lot from the Rob Penney era and it’s been beneficial to rugby.”

When the old coach leaves, elements of their on-field work – both positive and negative – will naturally remain in the playing group until the new coaching staff fully implement their style.

A lot of other things change almost immediately.

For example, any new coach will have very concrete ideas over who he wants around the playing group, both at a senior level and with regards to youth development. They might have a different set of criteria for judging young players or they may have positional blindspots. They also might value a certain player that is quite comfortable in one system quite highly and then sign that player to a long term contract. If the coach leaves soon after, those contracting decisions might hamper the work of the coach that comes after them, especially if they want to change styles quite radically.

Everything from player retention and recruitment to academy development to style of play runs through the DOR/Head Coach so if there is a complete break in continuity, the process starts over again.

That’s why when we look at successful teams in the PRO14, Gallagher Premiership, TOP14, European Cup and at test level, we see high levels of cohesion and coaching/administrative continuity.

***

When we examine Munster from 1998-2012, we see high levels of both Cohesion and Continuity.

There was a committed core of quality players in key positions and, from a coaching POV, there was a lot of continuity.

Declan Kidney was the head coach between 1998/99 and 2002/03 with a lot of success.

Alan Gaffney took over for two seasons between 2003/4 and 2004/5 and spoke before his first season about how he wasn’t there to radically change anything.

“We are certainly not here to re-invent the wheel, that is for sure & certain, nor Brian Hickey or myself, while it won’t be steady as she goes, to some extent, we as a team will do up a team structure and a team plan, the way that we all really want to play the game, this will be something that everybody will own, it won’t be a dictatorial attitude of me saying this is what we are going to do, it will also be up to the players from Gallaimh down to the young academy boys saying this is how we intend to play the game, and everybody will sign off on it.”

Declan Kidney returned after Gaffney’s departure and stayed for three seasons between 2005/06 and 2007/08, winning two European Cups along the way.

When Kidney left to coach Ireland, Munster replaced him with Tony McGahan, who had been at Munster as an assistant since 2005 and he stayed for four seasons until 2011/12 when it became clear that a more radical change would be needed.

In fourteen years, Munster had three different coaches with one of those coaches serving as an assistant to the other for three seasons before taking over as the main man.   

In the eight years since Tony McGahan’s departure, we’ve had four different head coaches with one of those serving as an assistant under the previous coach.

There are reasons for these departures, of course.

Munster had thought that Penney was in place for at least three seasons before his departure to Japan at the end of year two. When Penney left, his attack coach went too and that meant that Anthony Foley’s tenure was started with entirely new backroom staff, some of whom were stepping up to elite professional level from AIL for the first time.

Foley’s tenure as head coach to an end after a serious dip in his second season – more on that later – but he became a key part of the next coach’s staff and I think that played a part in the relative success that was to follow, prior to Anthony Foley’s untimely and tragic passing. Rassie Erasmus was appointed as Director of Rugby on a three-year deal in 2016 and found immediate success – reaching a Heineken Cup semi-final after two seasons of failing to exit the pools and making a PRO12 final – but that term was cut short after just one season when the Springboks came calling.

Munster were initially looking for Jacques Nienaber to succeed Erasmus after the success of Rassie’s first season – continuity – but when it became clear that Jacques was heading back to South Africa with Erasmus, Munster would have to look outside the province again.

Johann Van Graan took over in November 2017 and immediately had to replace Neinaber with JP Ferreira. Coming in midway through a season is never ideal in rugby and in a lot of ways, Van Graan would have to continue the work of Erasmus until he had the time and space to implement his own ideas about gameplan, recruitment and development.

Van Graan is currently in his second full season in charge as of May 25th 2020 but had to replace his forwards and attack coach at the end of his first season. This season, prior to the Coronavirus lockdown, is the first full one with Van Graan, Larkham, Rowntree and Ferreira as senior coaches.

For whatever the reasons, it’s incredibly difficult to build long-term cohesion when the person in charge changes every two seasons over six years. It’s telling that Van Graan’s current tenure – two and a half seasons – is the longest any Munster coach has had since Tony McGahan.

***

When we examine Leinster over the same time period – 1998 to 2020 – we see a real lack of cohesion from 1998 to 2005 and then really smart continuity decisions for the most part thereafter. Around the turn of the Millenium, Leinster went through four senior coaches in seven seasons before Michael Chieka took over in 2005/06, ironically in the wake of Declan Kidney’s ill-tempered departure midway through the 2004/05 season.

Those four seasons – with a Heineken Cup win his third season – was a key bit of stability for Leinster and, for the most part, they’ve either made excellent coaching reset decisions in the case of Joe Schmidt from 2010/11 to 2011/12 or by promoting Leo Cullen from within in the wake of Matt O’Connor’s departure and then adding in Stuart Lancaster in tandem with Cullen in 2016.

The odd man out here is Matt O’Connor during Leinster’s two Sexton-less seasons but he was still relatively successful from a trophy perspective and he departed at the end of a pretty distinct cycle in Leinster’s development.

Post Cycle Blues

World Cups provide a natural contracting reset point from the point of view of player development, especially in a top-down system like the one operated by the IRFU where to play for Ireland you have to play in Ireland. The reasons for this unwritten law is that without the carrot of test rugby, Ireland’s best players would be vulnerable to being pried away by wealthy French or English clubs which would have a knock-on effect on the competitiveness of the provinces on a European level.

With that in mind, you’ll often see IRFU/provincial contracting patterns lining up with the end of a World Cup cycle when it comes to senior players because it allows the Irish head coach an element of certainty when it comes to building a squad over a four year period. From a provincial coach’s perspective, a lot of the contracting of your top guys is out of your hands in a lot of cases but, as they are usually your best players, it balances it out.

Another factor to consider is that the Irish system heavily regulates game time for players that are heavily involved with the Irish national team and directly contracted by the IRFU so if you’re Van Graan or Cullen, you won’t have access to your internationals for stretches of the PRO14 but those players are expected to get access to top-level Champions Cup games to keep them sharp for test rugby.

This isn’t a bad thing – obviously – because they are your best players by definition but it does create a supranational order to your squad. There have been times when I’ve personally thought that some of the provinces were stalled a little in their development in certain positions during late points in a World Cup cycle because the player in question was still a vital component for the Irish national side.

It’s an imperfect system but I would argue that it has been incredibly successful in an Irish context over the last 20 years. The Irish national side pays the majority of the bills for Irish rugby and, until that changes, the health and success of the test side will rightly take priority.

There is no doubting that this can create issues for the provinces, though. There’s the regular unavailability of top players for PRO14 games week to week and late-week arrivals back from test camp which can hurt cohesion and the implementation of a certain game plan. That has been mentioned as a challenge by Van Graan and Larkham at different points during the season but it is a part of the job that they recognise and work through, in the same way that training on a horrible Tuesday morning in December is.

The World Cup cycle can be a difficult obstacle to navigate when you go from Year 4 back to Year 1. World Cups often signal an immediate or imminent endpoint for players in their early/mid-thirties so, unless you’re signing someone from outside, you will ideally have your succession plans in place by Year Two of the cycle.

By the time 2015/16 rolled around, Munster were in a position where succession problems and cruel luck with injury were really starting to bite.

JJ Hanrahan’s departure for Northampton on a two-season deal coupled with Jonny Holland/Tyler Bleyendaal’s serious injury issues meant that we had one senior #10 in Ian Keatley at the start of 2015/16.

BJ Botha was on a six-month contract – signed in March 2015 – that would ultimately get extended until the end of the season when Stephen Archer underwent surgery on his neck. John Ryan was covering tighthead at this point but Munster felt that Mario Sagario, the Uruguayan tighthead, would be needed as a medical joker.

In the back row, Tommy O’Donnell missed half the season because of a dislocated hip but, more seriously, club captain Peter O’Mahony would miss the entirety of the season due to a serious knee injury. CJ Stander was named captain for the season in O’Mahony’s absence and the amount of serious injury to CORE 1 players meant that Jack O’Donoghue was pushed up into a dramatically higher role from the two starts he’d made during his debut season the year before. The same could be said of Dave O’Callaghan, who went from a relatively minor role in 2014/15 to starting Heineken Cup games in 2015/16.

Robin Copeland took on a bigger role in 2015/16 but he struggled to replicate the impact he’d shown at Cardiff Blues, I think largely in part because Munster’s style of play didn’t really suit his talents all that much when he played on the flank. Copeland also failed to dislodge CJ Stander from the #8 jersey for big games which meant Copeland’s biggest strength – his handling, secondary ball carrying and his ability to launch off the scrum – wasn’t something he could do at #6 in the way that we were deploying him.

When he was given opportunities at #8 with Stander at #6 – like during the home loss to Connacht – he didn’t really take his chances.

At hooker, our starting player from the previous season – the impressive Duncan Casey – would miss almost the entirety of 2015/16 through injury. Mike Sherry, the man who Casey essentially replaced, would return to the Munster starting team for the first time since last 2013 and would share the jersey with Niall Scannell after Damien Varley suffered an injury that would ultimately retire him.

Hooker is one of the toughest positions for me to look in this series, given the number of serious injuries suffered there since 2011. Over the course of four seasons, Munster lost Jerry Flannery to a career-ending injury, then lost the high potential academy player – Mike Sherry – who replaced him to a series of long term injuries and then lost the high potential academy player who replaced Sherry – Duncan Casey – to a season-ending injury the year after Sherry’s injury, as well as losing the experienced squad player that covered the position – Damien Varley – to retirement in the same season that Casey missed through injury.

Imagine if Leinster lost Mike Ross to a season-ending injury in 2014 and then lost Furlong to multiple long-term injuries in 2015 and then lost Andrew Porter to long term injuries the year after while you also lose Michael Bent to retirement.

This is what we’re talking about here.

Mike Sherry’s return in 2015/16 was tough because it really looked like the injuries had taken their toll on his ability to project himself at a high level at that point. Prior to the injury, Sherry was a very mobile, highly skilled player in open-field that was a good scrummager and a fantastic lineout thrower but he didn’t return at the same level. Niall Scannell made good strides during 2015/16 also until he eventually became fully established as a starter in 2016.

At full-back, Felix Jones suffered a second serious neck injury during a PRO14 game against Glasgow that would force him to retire at 28 years of age. Munster would sign Lucas González Amorosino as cover post World Cup in the aftermath of Jones injury.

The loss of Jones was a significant blow. Andrew Conway could cover fullback – and he did for a lot of that season – but Jones was a hugely influential on-field leader for Munster. That is not easily replaced.

In midfield, Munster’s big new signing Francis Saili was settling in well enough but the #12 shirt was in a state of flux. Denis Hurley was the main in possession heading into the season having captained Munster in the PRO12 final in 2014/15 but he was already suffering due to a series of injuries, something that would plague him during 2015/16 and that would ultimately retire him at the end of the season.

That lead to Rory Scannell playing 1544 minutes at #12 during 2015/16, having started the season in the academy. He would advance to a development contract at the end of the 2015/16 and a senior deal by 2017/18.

But the biggest issues were in the second row.

Paul O’Connell was leaving Munster after the World Cup one way or the other and Donncha O’Callaghan was granted an early release from his contract in September 2015. Donnacha Ryan would spend the early part of the season at the World Cup with Ireland after 13 injury-plagued months, leaving Dave Foley and Billy Holland as the only senior locks in the squad.

Munster signed the highly experienced Wallaby international Mark Chisholm to a two-year deal in August 2015 but he was dogged with injury and concussion during his spell at Munster and would only play 18 games in total during his two years at the club.

Dave Foley had been signed to a new two year Munster deal in the aftermath of his man of the match test debut in November 2014 but I think it’s fair to say that he was failing to play up to the level of the totemic players that had come before him.

In the academy, there were guys like John Madigan who certainly had the size and physical profile to possibly make an impact during a season when Munster’s second-row had rarely been more open to challenge but Madigan suffered a season-ending knee injury early in the term that put paid to any Rory Scannell-esque emergence at lock.

2015/16 saw Munster lose;

• Club captain Peter O’Mahony for the entire season.
• Paul O’Connell (to Toulon/retirement)
• Donncha O’Callaghan (to Worcester)
• Felix Jones (retirement)
• Damien Varley (injury/retirement)
• Duncan Casey (injury)
• Tommy O’Donnell (for half the season)
• Tyler Bleyendaal (injury)

And all this in an environment where players like Denis Hurley, Mike Sherry, Stephen Archer and others suffered from various niggling injuries and where our primary starting tighthead was 35 years of age and rapidly losing effectiveness at the highest level. Throw in our starting #10 going through a career-low run of form with no senior back up in the squad and is it any wonder that 2015/16 was Munster’s worst ever season from a performance perspective?

Anthony Foley took a lot of flak for 2015/16 and most of it was unfair. I am not exempt from this criticism. I felt that our attacking shape was rudimentary, that we looked underpowered upfront and that key parts of our set-piece had gone radically backwards.

That isn’t to say that there wasn’t good approach play at times or clever use of kicking to build opportunities, but we had certainly gone away from a lot of the style that Penney had tried to implement and everything was being undone by a desperate error rate at key moments.

We started the season well enough from a results perspective, winning seven of our first eight games in the PRO12 and Champions Cup but there were concerning elements across most of those games, although only enough to lose one – a narrow loss away to the Scarlets in Llanelli.

Then it all started to go wrong.

Munster lost at home to Connacht – the eventual champions – for the first time in 29 years. Connacht were a highly cohesive squad in Lam’s third season in charge and had minimal disruption to their squad from the 2015 World Cup. They won 18-12 on the night but it looked like Munster were playing a different – inferior – game at times. We backed that loss up with a dismal loss away to the Dragons. But this, on its own, wasn’t all that much of a problem. Munster had always lost league games here and there over the years and even the great squads of the early and mid-2000s were capable of dropping absolute stinkers – the 32-10 loss away to an 11th placed Glasgow Warriors side in 2005/06 stands out to me for some reason – but that was almost always backed up with big performances in Europe.

This time, Munster would go into a back to back series and lose twice on the bounce to Leicester Tigers. This was the second season in a row that Munster had lost in Thomond Park but the previous loss to Clermont – finalists that year – was a tighter affair and easier to swallow in the aftermath given ASM’s performance in the tournament.

The 31-19 loss at home to Leicester in 2015/16 felt like an unravelling of things. The game was relatively close for large stretches but a series of Munster errors – missed conversions, missed penalties in front of the posts, loose kicking, knock-ons at crucial times, sloppy defence, poor lineouts – handed a massive win to Leicester.

In the aftermath, the negativity was something else. Keatley’s eventual substitution had been sarcastically cheered by a small minority of fans in Thomond Park that night – I was there, I heard it – but it was bang out of order and only added to the swirl of negativity that was surrounding the province. Ian Keatley had a poor game against Leicester, that much cannot be denied, but he was far from the only one.

Foley spoke mid-way through the week with Welford Road on the horizon about the need for Munster to improve their standards;

“There were opportunities in those games but we butchered them. After in that green zone area, we have talked about it again. We have looked at how we train, how we go about training, what standards we set upon ourselves in training. Just try and eliminate it.

You are what you do at times. Sometimes you turn a blind eye to maybe one or two things being dropped in training because you don’t see the significance of it. We have to tidy up a lot of that and make sure it is taken out of our game.”

It would get worse. Munster lost the game in Welford Road and backed that up with a desperately disappointing loss against Leinster in Thomond Park.

Munster would win away against Ulster the week after – with Keatley as man of the match – before losing 27-7 to a Stade Francais side that played the entire second half with 14 men. Out of Europe after four games, Munster would finish the pool strongly before limping through the rest of the PRO12 season suffering bad losses away to Glasgow, Cardiff and Connacht, losing at home to the Ospreys and only managing to qualify for the Champions Cup on the last day of the season at home to the Scarlets.

Munster were a game away from the Challenge Cup.

But even with this, would you believe me if I told you that Foley won more games in his two seasons as a head coach than Rob Penney – 39 wins to 38? Would you believe me if I told you that Rob Penney’s 62% win record while in charge of Munster was only 1% higher than Foley’s record?

The difference is, Penney’s Munster won most of the big European games and never lost at home in the Heineken Cup/Champions Cup. When it comes to perception, that’s what matters.

Munster’s 2015/16 was disastrous for a few reasons but when you look at the context, it becomes almost obvious. The post-O’Connell era would be difficult for any team to manage. How do you replace a multi-cap test Lions captain, Irish captain and icon of the game that’s been synonymous with the club for 14 years?

The loss of O’Gara – another player of similar stature – and other club icons like Hayes, Horan, Wallace, Leamy and Flannery around the same time was offset by the scale of O’Connell’s influence. He wasn’t the Munster captain for the last two years of his career here but his influence and quality brought up the level of those around him.

Donncha O’Callaghan was another massive loss. He signed a two-year deal in 2014 that would have taken him up to the end of 2015/16 but he was given a release to join Worcester before the 2015/16 season.

O’Callaghan might not have had the totemic impact for as long O’Connell did but he was an unbelievable trainer, standard setter and the ultimate professional when it came to his mental and physical preparation, even in his mid-30s.

How do you replace that guy AND O’Connell in the same season? You can’t. It would have been a possibility if Munster had been able to bring through Nagle from 2011 like they’d planned but injury and circumstance made that impossible. Iconic players are more than the numbers on a data sheet. They are a collection of experience and intangibles that you only fully appreciate in their absence.

Throw in the loss of Damien Varley – another leader for the group – and then the cruel loss of another standard-setter like Felix Jones and you can see the damage that marred this season.

That’s before we talk about losing our current captain, vocal on-field leader and standard-bearer Peter O’Mahony to a serious, long term knee injury at the same time as your only fit and available senior flyhalf and primary goal kicker is through a career-low in form/performance.

At this point, Munster had a large academy class but in 2015/16, there wasn’t a massive list of players that were ready to step up looking for more game time. Darren Sweetnam moved up from the academy to a development deal alongside O’Donoghue for this season and while Shane Buckley had a lot of potential – he won the same Academy Player of the Year award that Conor Murray, Keith Earls, Craig Casey and Jack O’Donoghue won – but the time 2015/16 had rolled around he was after dealing with a lot of time out injured at key points in his development.

If you look through our academy class as it stands in 2015/16, you can see where the issues are starting to arise;

Year 1: Ned Hodson (Centre/Cork Con), Ben Kilkenny (Back-row/Young Munster), Steven McMahon (Winger/Garryowen), Liam O’Connor (Prop/Cork Con), Conor Oliver (Connacht), JP Phelan (Prop/UCD), Tomás Quinlan (Outhalf/Cork Con).

Year 2: Stephen Fitzgerald (Connacht), Ryan Foley (Scrumhalf/Cork Con), Dan Goggin (Munster), Darragh Moloney (Lock/Cork Con), Brian Scott (Munster/retired).

Year 3: Rory Burke (Prop/Cork Con), Jack Cullen (Scrumhalf/Bruff), Niall Horan (Prop/Shannon), David Johnston (Fullback/UL Bohs), Gearoid Lyons (Outhalf/Shannon), Sean McCarthy (Lock/Shannon), John Madigan (Lock/Dolphin), Greg O’Shea (Winger/Shannon), Rory Scannell (Munster), Alex Wootton (Munster).

Only seven of these twenty-two players are still playing at an elite level (PRO14/Top14/GP) and only two of them would currently be considered to be CAT1 tier players (Goggin/Scannell). Wootton had a really good season in 2017/18 but has dropped out of favour since. Liam O’Connor has shown a lot of potential but only recently recovered from an incredibly serious knee injury and starts a new two-year contract this July. Brian Scott has just had to retire after a series of foot injuries. Conor Oliver and Stephen Fitzgerald had decent spells at Munster but both were interrupted by injuries at key times and have since moved to Connacht for more game time.

A lot has been made of Munster’s inability to bring through starting international tier quality from the academy since 2013-14 but when I’m put with that question I always ask – where are the Tadhg Beirne’s?

No academy system is perfect but if there were serious talents being missed along the age-grades we would expect to see equivalent talents like Tadhg Beirne and Robin Copeland appearing in England or France having left the Munster system. To date, I think the only big miss is Ultan Dillane, who chose a full Connacht academy contract over a Munster sub-academy deal in the summer of 2012 for reasons relating to his family’s financial circumstances.

Personally speaking, I think the underage structures have improved considerably since in the time period around 2015/16 and we are now beginning to see the benefits with the current group of academy players and recent graduates.

I’ll cover the recent history and possible future in the last part of this series. Up next, I’ll be looking at Leinster’s 2015 to 2020 to see how they handled their reset after the 2015 World Cup.