Dragons 19 Munster 38

About Time

Munster have been waiting to give some team a right hiding and in a thrilling first 40 minutes at Rodney Parade, the Dragons drew the short straw. Only a series of increasingly bizarre head injuries stopped this from being a 60+ pumping, but we'll take the five points and move on.

Quality of Opposition

Match Importance

Performance

Attack

Defence

Set Piece

3.8

To give you an idea of how injury disrupted this game was, at one stage Munster had to replace Billy Burns with Brian Gleeson to try to finagle Jack O’Donoghue and John Hodnett into wingers, which pushed my role theory concepts to the very limit. Edge forwards are quite like old school wingers, when you think about it, so what if they actually were wingers? Interesting, I said aloud to nobody in particular, as I chewed the edge of my desk off.

Anyway. It doesn’t really matter. Munster’s job in this game was to win, get five points if possible and look forward to a three week break. We’ve been on the go since the end of November whilst in the middle of a massive coaching transition and a rake of injuries so this break couldn’t have come at a better time for everyone.

The five points earned here was enough to scoot us back into the top eight with results elsewhere adding a little daylight in the middle of the URC mosh pit, for a time at least. This Six Nations window is sure to bring one thing; unpredictability. For Munster, our job is to buck that trend, use our relatively low test burden to stack back-to-back-to-back bonus point wins and jockey for a top four spot. Everyone else is going to drop points, I feel, but we don’t have that wiggle room.

If we can duplicate the first half we saw here across multiple games, we’ll be exactly where we need to be. For those first 40 minutes, we were genuinely unplayable.

In the Red Eye, I spoke about the Dragons tendency to kick often and kick long this season. My theory was, if they repeated that tactic here, that we had the weapons to hurt them on transition over and over again. It played out exactly like that, and from one of the very first sequences of the game.

Dragons won a penalty in their half but missed touch – happens a lot these days – and that opened up a long transition for Ben O’Connor, who ran it back straight and hard to the halfway line.

Look at the zip on this runback – fast, direct and looking to engage defenders. Also keep an eye out for Tom Ahern, who spots that the kick won’t make touch pretty early in its trajectory. He immediately starts to make a run to the opposite wing, looking for an edge forward mismatch.

We take another ruck in the middle of the field and get the ball out relatively quickly. Daly started the play guarding the touchline but looped around the centre field ruck to pop up as a late arriving layered handler off a very well executed Burns loop play with Scannell.

Once Daly finds Ahern, this is always going to be a try.

Ahern and Kilgallen are a lethal pairing in the tramlines. When we can open up that space with unstructured play on the edges, very few teams can live with that. Look at the tight line from Burns and the decoy work from Farrell to open up this space for Daly.

This is the exact type of play that we have been adjusting to mid-season. In a global game that is going to feature more kicking by default as a result of recent law changes, the best way to find a point of difference is on transition.

Whenever the Dragons kicked long to exit, we hurt them. Look at the viciousness of this runback from Kilgallen – he goes hunting for Lydiate in the middle of the field.

Off that ruck, Munster have already got a transition shape in position albeit with Ahern and Scannell switching positions.

Daly runs the same loop line around the back and that isolates the edge defender. O’Donoghue holds his depth really well and flies through for a clean line break. Again, look at the work of Ahern to sell the pinch off Burns, as well as Farrell looping around as another option.

We should have scored on the ensuing phases but just dotted the ball short off a powerful Coombes carry. Either way, we were establishing a pattern to the Dragons – kick the way you usually do and we can score from anywhere. But they aren’t built to do anything else.

They tried to shorten their kicking game with more box contestables but found our work off those to be just as deadly. Here’s the first segment of a scoring possession.

Watch how our midfielder file to edges while our back three swarm the middle of the field on the fold around transition rucks. Farrell files out to the wing where he can drift back in to find scrambling defenders in unstructured space that he can piece up against the grain.

Our back three loop around to fill that space between Burns and Farrell really late, and with scope to angle in as a ruck support player if needed.

Once we have that position, our forward pods can flow towards the ball at pace and cut up a retreating defensive line who have had to sprint 30m to get set.

Look at this layered four man shape – last seen in preseason – with Kendellen continuing his line as the inside barrel from the previous pod to take the scoring pass.

He needs to get under the posts the next time, but Dragons had absolutely no answer for our transition work at this stage, and we’d score two more tries from the next two restarts. They were blown away.

When Farrell went off with for a HIA, a lot of our attacking flow went with him as he was heavily involved in almost everything positive we did with the ball in hand. The other HIAs added to that disruption and the flow left our game in transition as a result as a rejigged backline – that kept rejigging – never really settled.

It was 31-0 at halftime and Munster were never in any danger of getting into a Zebre-esque implosion.

The second half was as scrappy you might think but that shouldn’t take away from a performance that had an awful lot to like. Dragons were poor – nobody would deny that – but our ambition on transition and willingness to run with the ball as an exit to spook them into reshaping their strategy there really stood out, regardless of how bad Dragons were.

As starts to the back nine of the regular season go, you can’t really ask for much better than this.