Sometimes I think we’re so obsessed with ‘clicking’ at Munster that we could be no-name actors in a Predator movie stumbling through a steamy Columbian jungle. In writing this stupid little intro I’ve just realised how stuffed you’d be in a Predator movie if you were short-sighted and without your glasses. Look out for the blurry thing in the trees trying to kill you? My guy, everything is blurry.
Anyway.
Ever since Munster committed to running a condensed preseason, with a new attacking framework, and new coaches combined with a late instruction from the national side to take out 10 of the players we were building around two weeks before the start of the season, it was a matter of when things would click, not if.
Building a new way of playing cannot be done overnight. When you discover that you’re losing 10 core guys two weeks before the opening game of the URC, throwing your first block of five games even further behind schedule when it comes to adopting that framework, that new way of playing gets pushed further out when it comes to adopting it fully across the squad. Using over 56 players in eight rounds of the URC sounds great but it’s a recipe for janky performances, which we’ve certainly had.
This stuff takes time. It takes reps on the training field. It takes hard half-hours in the post-match review. It takes minutes in-game. Why did Munster finally pull it together for “a turning point” against South Africa A? Because we had nine games up to that point where errors could be made, critiqued and then corrected while also getting core guys back into the team. That’s how real change is made and then settled among your core group.
How do I know that, regardless of how the next few weeks go, Munster are building something that we haven’t really seen before? A blown sequence that we gave up a crossing penalty on.
That kind of deep loop running combined with multiple pass options is exactly what we’re building towards. In the end, the pass didn’t go to the right guy but the principles of play we were using on that sequence were exactly what they need to be to break open a heavy defence.
If you read The Red Eye before the game you’ll have seen my little video bit on the space that Edinburgh leave on their defensive progressions and we were attacking it all throughout the game. Not just because of Mata, either, because our attacking framework as it stands is designed to attack teams at their hinges with our backline – and back three in particular – looping and sliding across the field to force mismatches, feint depth, and offer a consistent, rolling package of options for whoever has the ball at the moment.
It is a level of attack that we weren’t seeing last season, or really in any season.
This is high-level stuff with every player in the backline playing a role to identify and unbalance the opposition while being in a constant state of movement. In this scheme, everyone other than Carbery and Frisch is, essentially, a looping winger. It shows how someone like Fekitoa could fit in at #12 in this scheme too, actually, but it’s amazing how much better we look running this before you even get to the forwards playing tip-ons, the role of the small forward or edge forwards and it’s all fuelled on a Pass Per Carry ratio of 1.3. That’s consistency and it’s so different from last season where our primary scheme was radiating options off a Ruck Point Attack for three phases post-set piece and a flat 3-2-X with our wingers holding width for a kick option.
This is levels and levels beyond that when it comes to complexity. Why were we struggling to retain the ball at the breakdown in the first few weeks of running this against live opposition? Because we were hitting zones on the field where we haven’t had to retain the ball consistently over the last few seasons. Because the squad’s fitness and role versatility weren’t where they would need to be. Because this kind of system with this amount of variety would need time and familiarity to bed in consistently.
When it beds in, we score tries.
In this game, where we started objectively poorly and coughed up repeated errors in the first half that led directly to Edinburgh tries, the onus was on the group to stay calm, execute our windows and hit Edinburgh where we needed to. Our kicking game hemmed Edinburgh in and allowed them to overplay in their Q2, which we knew they would. Our defensive lineout pulled Edinburgh below the 86% completion they’ve been running up until this point, exactly as we selected to do. Our scrum prevented them from squeezing a tonne of penalties and kept it as a neutral platform and, when the moment came to take our points, we did so consistently and accurately.
Munster’s second half – the last 43 minutes, really, when you consider the very end of the first half – was the kind of clinicality that will really satisfy the coaches. This was a team selected to do a job with their particular role strengths while sticking to the template that we know will work for us going forward. With Toulouse on the horizon, we know we don’t have to start playing ball out of nowhere to stay with them because we’ve been playing ball all along.
This result against Edinburgh will stack up really well as the season progresses and, sure, they have issues at halfback that will limit them against any serious opponent but they will kill teams who make mistakes against them and they have a pack that can square up with most. For Munster, the real bonus (outside the fiver we banked with Coombe’s try) was that we managed this game methodically without a huge pre-game adjustment.
We laid out our game to Edinburgh and took it to them, as opposed to doing the chameleon job we’d have attempted last season. That alone is as positive a sign as I can find in our journey under this coaching staff.
| Names | Rating |
|---|---|
| Jeremy Loughman | ★★★★ |
| Niall Scannell | ★★★ |
| John Ryan | ★★★★ |
| Tadhg Beirne | ★★★★★ |
| Jean Kleyn | ★★★★★ |
| Peter O'Mahony | ★★★★ |
| John Hodnett | ★★★★ |
| Gavin Coombes | ★★★★ |
| Craig Casey | ★★★★★ |
| Joey Carbery | ★★★★ |
| Simon Zebo | ★★★ |
| Rory Scannell | ★★ |
| Antoine Frisch | ★★★★★ |
| Calvin Nash | ★★★★★ |
| Shane Daly | ★★★★ |
| Diarmuid Barron | ★★★ |
| Josh Wycherley | ★★★ |
| Roman Salanoa | ★★★ |
| Jack O'Donoghue | ★★★ |
| Alex Kendellen | ★★★ |
| Paddy Patterson | ★★★★★ |
| Jack Crowley | ★★★★ |
| Pat Campbell | ★★★ |
