It goes some way to explaining how up and down this season has been so far that Munster have played infinitely worse against teams that would have to improve 200% just to be considered a patch on this Toulouse side and ended up losing by more points. Look at the team that lost to the Dragons in Week #2 of the URC or laboured to a non-BP win over a poor Zebre side in Musgrave Park.
Could you imagine that side pushing this Toulouse team to a low PPC, high kick pressure, maul and drive game in the European Cup? It’s an illustration of how far we’ve come since September that the hilariously, almost cartoonishly thick freezing fog helped Toulouse more than it did us.
Used to be that we’d be hoping for weather conditions just like that to ambush Toulouse but here it was almost the opposite – it slowed us down and gave Toulouse’s kick-pressure game more room to manoeuvre, especially in the second half when they were cheesing the clock and sucking wind so hard the first couple of rows of the terrace could’ve passed out from oxygen deprivation.
But we’re not quite where we need to be to take advantage of that – just yet – and we’re lacking the depth that we need to consistently tangle with a side as big as Toulouse like for like, especially when they were playing such a lockdown brand of rugby as they were here.
Toulouse’s PPC for this game was 1.15 and was close to hanging around 1 pass per carry for large sections of the game as they tried to cut out the error count and cheese the clock. Back in April, Toulouse’s Pass Per Carry was 1.25 which is a reversion in the scope of their intent game on game but within the parameters of what we’d expect given the conditions and what we’d expect from Toulouse in general.
Munster’s Pass Per Carry ratio in April was 1.38 which was right in line with our trend towards the end of the season – Larkham’s “hard ground style”, so to speak – but on Sunday, Munster’s PPC was dramatically increased to 1.55. In objectively worse handling conditions we expanded on our game from April, played with the bravery I was looking for and, ultimately, Munster stuck to the principles that we started with earlier in the season.
In the end, we were beaten, though. There are clear reasons for that but bottling this game isn’t one of them. Toulouse were just better where and when it counted.
It happens. It’ll happen to a lot of teams that Toulouse will play this season, I think, and if they can keep their core players fit I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see them add a sixth star over their crest at the end of the season. As for Munster? We weren’t drastically outmatched, we weren’t dramatically outplayed, we just… lost.
Our approach was centred around extending our play away from the heaviest part of Toulouse’s defence. This meant a huge amount of passing was required by our forwards – Beirne in particular – but all thirteen of our forwards passed the ball 42 times between them. Just to illustrate the difference in approach, all twenty-three Toulouse players passed the ball 81 times in total.
We had to play this way to avoid getting stuffed physically by Toulouse’s colossal inside defence. That meant a lot of width on the pass from the ruck, a lot of variety when playing directly off #9 and a lot of bravery when it came to the pass selection from #10.
This is a Munster side that’s attacking with variety and a level of complexity that we straight-up haven’t seen before. We used to try to kick around a size differential but we showed here that we’re capable of handling around it too. Sure, it wasn’t perfect and there were errors and turnovers, but that’s how you have to approach a team as physically massive as Toulouse if you want to beat them. They weren’t beaten up, they weren’t coming off a nightmare run of games and we pushed them pretty hard in a razor-thin game where we played the majority of the rugby.
Post-game, Graham Rowntree spoke about the maul on both sides of the shove being the difference between a win and a loss and he’s dead right. At the start of the second half, we conceded a close-range lineout – forced off a turnover when we got scragged on a high pass per carry sequence – and our maul defence wasn’t really good enough.
It was an excellent throw to the tail, yes, and that unbalanced our counter-shove unit but you can see here that we left three guys out of the initial shove.
That’s typically a coaching decision pre-game or a general approach and it’s not without risk, especially in slippy conditions like we saw here. If O’Mahony doesn’t slip, he stops Marchand quicker and it’s no try – we had given away a needless and ineffective side entry previously so they would have had a second go anyway – but he was covering the entire inside flank himself.
On the other side of the ball, we struggled to impact a physically bigger unit that we were giving up 40KG to man for man but even then, we were a little static and monodirectional. We had been doing good things with a power hinge prior to this game but that didn’t really materialise here.
Ultimately we didn’t quite have the depth or the quality to get it done when the game was there to be won in the last few minutes. Toulouse are far further along the road than we are and can bring on multi-cap internationals and highly regarded English international short-term jokers to keep their game going to a high level. We’re still bedevilled with injury so we don’t have guys like Edogbo, Wycherley, Ahern or that RG Snyman guy to help turn the tide against a side we’re giving up so much size to.
Close, but not close enough and a loss is a loss. The losing bonus point will be useful, for sure, and I think anyone that wants to see what we’re trying to do offensively will see further developments in that regard here against Super Elite opposition. The biggest question mark about this season is whether or not we can get more of our second rows on the field consistently, something we’ve failed to do for nearly four or five seasons at this point.
If we can get some of the ballast that we’ve already got in the squad on the field regularly to go with the high-tempo, high-skill, high-PPC game we’re already showing without them who knows what could happen this season? Either way games like this show how far we’ve come since the start of the season but they also showcase some of the slots in the squad where we need to add some quality.
We’re on the right track though, I think this game is proof of it. That proof will be put on the line again against a smarting Northampton side next weekend but I think we’re at a point now where a lot of the kinks have been worked out and now it’s time to start getting Ws on the board consistently.
| Names | Rating |
|---|---|
| Jeremy Loughman | ★★★★ |
| Niall Scannell | ★★★ |
| John Ryan | ★★★★ |
| Tadhg Beirne | ★★★★ |
| Jean Kleyn | ★★★ |
| Peter O'Mahony | ★★★ |
| John Hodnett | ★★★★ |
| Gavin Coombes | ★★★★ |
| Craig Casey | ★★★★ |
| Joey Carbery | ★★★★ |
| Shane Daly | ★★★ |
| Rory Scannell | ★★★ |
| Antoine Frisch | ★★★ |
| Calvin Nash | ★★★★ |
| Mike Haley | ★★★★ |
| Diarmuid Barron | ★★★ |
| Josh Wycherley | ★★★ |
| Roman Salanoa | ★★★ |
| Jack O'Donoghue | ★★ |
| Alex Kendellen | ★★★ |
| Paddy Patterson | ★★ |
| Jack Crowley | ★★★★ |
| Keith Earls | ★★★ |
