Lineouts are hard, man.

You know that already, of course, because I start most of my lineout articles with a variation of that opening line AND we’ve gone over them on these pages again and again and again. One of the biggest questions I’ve had over the past few weeks has been variations on “what’s going wrong with Munster’s lineout” with “FFS” added depending on how close to a lost lineout they were when they decided to message me.

My usual answer to that question is “it’s complicated”. If we keep the last three games as the scope of our examination, we can observe a raw statistic.

We’ve had 43 lineouts over the last three games and of those, we’ve won 37 and lost 6; a return of 86%.

That doesn’t sound too bad, does it? I mean there’s a fair few exams that I’d have liked 86% in over the years but in the exam of top-level club rugby, 86% just won’t cut it. You’ll rarely run a lineout at 100% but ideally, you’d want to be getting a return somewhere between 90/95%. That 10% difference might not seem like an awful lot but it’s often the difference between who wins and loses come the end of the season. Munster’s 86% is even worse when you consider that raw number only refers to ball that was stolen directly or thrown crooked; it doesn’t cover the rake of ball that was technically won back on our side but lost after the lineout was successful. There are quite a number of those.

This, for example, is a considered a successful lineout because Munster won the lineout possession – technically speaking – and knocked it on after the lineout was over.

So why is Munster’s lineout percentage so low? There are a few factors.

First, the annoying one you won’t want to hear about – the weather. Munster’s last three games have taken place in windy, greasy conditions that make running a lineout quite difficult. That’s irritating to hear because it sounds like an excuse but it will ensure that you lose a few more lineouts than you’d like. That was especially true in the back to backs and exacerbated by quite a good Castres defensive effort in both games.

The second factor is game plan requirements, at least where Castres were concerned. We were trying to attack Castres at the tail and beyond the tail of the lineout quite a bit to take advantage of their lateral defensive speed and the fact that Castres will often throw up two counterjumpers.

That creates a bit of natural separation behind the lineout and Munster tried to exploit that. Generally, though, the longer you’re throwing the ball – or waiting to throw the ball – the more there is to go wrong and that has shown to be true over the last few weeks.

This might already seem like I’m trying to bail out the hookers but that isn’t true. We have seen some poor throws.

Neither of these throws are very good from a technical perspective, in my opinion. Not picking on Kevin O’Byrne here either, but both of these throws are “fat”, in that they have a lot of movement in the throw itself which saps speed out of the ball and gives Nagle a chance to compete with Wycherley at the tail. The ideal lineout ball will have a flat profile at the top of the jump to make it easier to catch – or so the ents I know in the second row tell me – so both of these examples would be poor enough throws in my book.

Some of the animation in that last movement is pretty average too. Loughman is on a lifting route to the tail of the lineout to help launch Wycherley but the shape of his run outside the two locks makes the destination of this throw pretty obvious once he steps outside Kleyn. That gives Ulster two seconds to get a counter launch at the tail and it’s enough to spoil our lineout scheme.

Trigger Point

Another issue I’ve seen has been our use of jump feints – they just haven’t been very good or very clever. One of my biggest bugbears in lineout design is a feint that triggers in the same approximate space that the actual launch is going to be.

Take this one, for example;

Castres took this one clean as a whistle because Beirne’s feint line – where he sells the idea of a possible launch and then a possible short ball at the front – was exactly where our throw was going.

You can get a closer look here;

Beirne’s line actually triggers Castres to jump exactly where they’d need to jump to steal this ball. The margins on this are quite small but the penalties for being a hair off are harsh. Here’s an example of it going well – O’Mahony triggers the jump but, crucially, it’s a good two seconds before Beirne launches.

The interference in the air on that last one was a common enough trope against Castres too. Not an excuse – I mean, the game’s over for nearly three weeks – but it does make clean ball harder to get when you can be knocked around in the air.

Only one of these was a penalty. Guess which one for a bit of fun at home.

Some of our go-to schemes are a little mono-positional, too. This one, for example, with the short runner coming towards the hooker, always tends to go to the spot right behind the feint line in the last three games.

That alone is enough to give the opposition a look at contesting in the middle position. They did on the example I covered earlier in the article and here;

Only a strong catch from Kleyn kept Treadwell away from this one. It was an easy gamble for Treadwell to make, though, and he almost got lucky. The position is too similar on each of these schemes and that’s a problem.

Mono-Positional

In the last few weeks, we’ve been as likely to go to very tail end of the lineout as we are to go to the front, with most of our throws going to the “back of the middle”.

So, in some ways, it doesn’t really matter what our schemes are because the opposition are gambling on position based on where we’ve been throwing the ball. Some of our schemes are quite intricate and well executed;

This was a triple feint run from the tail to the front from Wycherley (who’s an excellent lineout operator with regards to his launches and animation) that was executed pretty perfectly.

In some ways, the quality of our work pre-throw is pretty good for the most part but our lifts, our timing and our throws aren’t as spotless as they need to be when we’re going towards broadly similar spots on most of our throws. Essentially, you can get away with scrappy lifts, timing and throws if the opposition is uncertain of the destination because you’ll mostly be uncontested but if the opposition has a good idea of where you’ll contest, they’ll fancy having a cut off your throw. Castres did, so did Ulster. That’ll have to change.

In some ways, our need to go to the back half of the lineout as our primary outlet is based on Kleyn’s absence up until the Ulster game and the continuing absence of a ball-carrying back to hit tight off the lineout. When your backs need space to work, you need the head start that ball from the tail gives you and that’s added to our need to hit those advanced positions. Get Kleyn and ball carrying midfield threat and that need for advanced ball to the back half of the lineout might change.

For now, the only thing that is for sure is that 86% needs to improve pronto if Munster want to win things this season.