Defeating Leinster in this game was always going to be a monumental task – mentally, emotionally and physically. That Munster managed to do so playing high tempo, high variety on-ball rugby for almost the full 80 minutes is one of the most startling performances from a physical perspective in years. In well over a decade, you could say, without fear of being accused of hyperbole.
Nowhere is effort and physical output more measurable than at the offensive breakdown. The coal face, the engine of the game, the lungs of the game – whatever you want to call it, if you’re going to play offensive, possession rugby you will need to have the ability to cover the rucks that come with it.
A lot of the teams that want to play on-ball rugby with the kind of pass variety that you’ll need to crack an elite team open can’t cover the ground that comes with it.
Toulouse and the French national side are good recent examples of this; you can’t just become an on-ball team against an elite opponent if you’re primarily an off-ball team for the rest of the season, at least not in a way that can be reliably used successfully. When I saw Toulouse and France uppercut themselves twice in the same stadium against broadly the same opponent, I saw a side that ran the numbers on Leinster/Ireland, saw what worked against them and decided that was their game plan.
Both Toulouse and France are primarily off-ball teams when they’re at their best, in my opinion, and, more importantly, they are conditioned as such so any deviation from that conditioned scheme can lead to disastrous results against a side as organised and stable as Leinster.
What Leinster produce in a game is incredibly consistent above almost anything else. They kick more often and longer than almost any other side in Europe specifically to create counter-transition spacing. Leinster will kick long to you, and more often than not, they’ll squash your transition, win a penalty on the first few phases or they’ll force you to kick on the back foot where they’ll hit you on a transition that they use to create clean linebreaks or generate penalties when you’re caught offside by lightning quick ruck ball or trapped in a ruck/not rolling away.
What happens off the lineout? Leinster usually score, or they set a position where a score is inevitable, but make no mistake, their best work is done when they break open your behaviour to their kicking on transition.
The obvious hack to this game plan? You don’t kick on any terms but your own and you retain the ball over long periods when Leinster kick the ball to you. La Rochelle did this by rolling off #9 with their super heavyweight pack and midfield. Ulster did this with a heavy pack exclusively when they beat a variant of Leinster last season in the RDS. A low PPC game allows for easier ruck retention and reduces the scope for Leinster to win penalties, use counter-rucks or turnover the ball in the carry.
And on Saturday, Munster beat Leinster by playing a high Pass Per Carry game that would require a genuinely astounding level of Offensive Ruck Work output to work successfully.
MUNSTER’S OFFENSIVE RUCK WORK SCORE VS LEINSTER
- A Dominant Clean is an action that decisively secures possession when the ball carrier takes contact. A Dominant Clean does not have to be the first arrival at the breakdown but it is rewarded in the context of effectiveness. We will assign this action 3 points.
- A Guard Action is where a player plays a role in helping to retain possession after we have “re-won” the ball on the floor. Sometimes this can happen on a carry/ruck point where there is no active contention by the opposition. Let’s assign this action 2 points.
- An Attendance can be anything from standing as a “kick shield” on a ruck to adding a bit of bulk to ward against a counter-ruck. I’m marking this down as being worth 1 point.
- An Ineffective Action is a blown cleanout, a lean, a breakdown penalty or an action that I couldn’t see any direct benefit for. This will be worth -1 point
| Dominant Clean | Guard Action | Attendance | Ineffective | Ruck Work Score | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Loughman | 2 | 11 | 1 | 26 | |
| Barron | 5 | 14 | 43 | ||
| Archer | 4 | 21 | 54 | ||
| Kleyn | 2 | 12 | 30 | ||
| Beirne | 6 | 24 | 66 | ||
| O'Mahony | 6 | 7 | 1 | 1 | 31 |
| Hodnett | 8 | 11 | 1 | 47 | |
| Coombes | 6 | 18 | 2 | 56 | |
| Casey | 1 | 2 | 7 | ||
| Healy | 1 | 1 | 3 | ||
| Daly | 1 | 6 | 15 | ||
| Crowley | 3 | 7 | 23 | ||
| Frisch | 1 | 24 | 3 | 1 | 52 |
| Earls | 2 | 4 | |||
| Haley | 8 | 1 | 17 | ||
| Scannell | 3 | 12 | 2 | 1 | 33 |
| J.Wycherley | 6 | 9 | 1 | 2 | 33 |
| Salanoa | 3 | 12 | 1 | 34 | |
| F.Wycherley | 3 | 12 | 1 | 34 | |
| O'Donoghue | 5 | 4 | 2 | 25 | |
| Cronin | 0 | ||||
| Scanelll | 2 | 7 | 1 | 21 | |
| Kendellen | 1 | 2 |
The scoring we’re seeing here is outstanding. The only game that comes close to this level of breakdown output was Ireland vs France from this year’s Six Nations.
Top Five ORW Scorers
- Tadhg Beirne – 66 points
- Gavin Coombes – 56 points
- Stephen Archer – 54 points
- Antoine Frisch – 52 points
- John Hodnett – 47 points
Any score above 50 is an outstanding performance on these metrics. We’ve got three, close to four players at or near that number (one of them a midfielder!) with John Hodnett pushing close. Anything above 60 is elite-level territory and that’s exactly where you’d expect the outstanding, genuinely World Class Tadhg Beirne who was absolutely everywhere at the offensive breakdown. Antoine Frisch’s performance at the breakdown was of such a top-class level of output that I bumped his Wally Ratings score up to a full Five Stars. This is the kind of complete performance that could well shoot him into Andy Farrell’s thinking for the World Cup. He made his passes, yes, but his ability to help us retain the ball when we reset on the edges was test-level quality. Gavin Coombes transition into a top quality Half Lock Power Forward with the breakdown output to match.
Our push off the bench was genuinely game-changing also with Salanoa, Scannell and the Wycherley Brothers adding real venom and physicality.
The most interesting part of this game, for me, was our quarterly Combined Offensive Ruck Work output. Our third-quarter scoring is so astoundingly off-pattern with what we’ve done all season long that I had to redo the graph.
We locked Leinster out of that quarter – took the lead as a result – and I genuinely feel that the only reason this game was close at all was how badly we underperformed our ORW during the second and third quarters. We had multiple 22 entries in this period and only came away with 10 points.
If we can fix that aspect of our game and keep this level of ORW output we will beat any team and beat them out the gate at that.
