Munster 20 Edinburgh 19

Edging a Scrap

One of those games where the win feels better because of how close the loss passed us by. Far from a vintage performance against a big, powerful opponent, but with enough dog and grit to see out a win that looked like anything but with 20 to go.

Match Importance

Quality of Opponent

Attack

Defence

Set Piece

3

We know what it’s like to lose games like this. We’ve done it often enough. But, as with last week, we got to learn our lesson with a win, rather than a loss, which is the clearest sign of this squad’s improvement you could look to see this early in the season.

Three wins from three. Fourteen points from a possible fifteen and rolling into Croke Park with our business in order, but we’ll want more. This squad wants more, and it’s them who’ll have to go out there and take it.

Talking to a few of the players after the game, the consensus was that this was one of the most physical games they had played all year. You could see it. Edinburgh rolled up to this game without three of what I’d call their Category A matchday squad, but the vast majority of a pack that would likely start a knockout game for them next May. They were everything we expected them to be; they kicked conservatively, they were very strong in the scrum, especially when Jager was forced off early, and they played everything in a shoebox. For long stretches of the game, we couldn’t live with them physically in that shoebox. Still, despite a bad night in the lineout — traditionally a bellwether of a Munster loss — we pulled the game together over the full 80 minutes and did the job when it counted.

Edinburgh’s discipline, of course, was shocking. It was a large part of why they lost this game, but it was also why they were in a position to win it in the first place. When you push the limits at the defensive lineout and maul, when you defend as high and aggressively as Edinburgh did, when you roll the dice on early and off-the-ball tackles, when you play fast and loose to the point you almost dare the referee to penalise you, when you assume that, shit, he can’t penalise everything, you pay a tax. That tax was four yellow cards, but if you’re Edinburgh, you don’t really concern yourselves with those; they were the cost of doing business.

They wanted to bring their physical size — something Munster were well aware of in the preseason when looking at this game, and something we identified as the main problem when we lost to them last season — to bear one way or the other. Their front five heavy hitters — Schoeman, Rae, Sykes and Skinner, with Boan Venter and Paul Hill on the bench — are all hanging around 120kg or above, and it showed at key points.

Their first try was the kind of “ladder” we wanted to avoid. A knock-on off the re-start, a dominant scrum launch that made extra ground up the flanks because we needed both flankers locked in place behind their props to keep out their front five. Offside penalty, 5m lineout, try.

Rae does a really good job of pushing through Wycherley’s flank on the drop, and that sets the momentum and space that made an Edinburgh score almost inevitable.

Their second came from another ladder — poor Munster launch play ending in a knock-on, strong scrum binding in the flankers, that opened a lane for Velacott to kick to pressure, which led directly to 5m pressure.

Nash’s pass to Haley here wasn’t great — to put it mildly — and that knock-on gave Edinburgh the ladder they’re built to use.

Our lineout on the 5m was really poor too. Barron got the heat in the crowd around me in the press box, but this one comes back on Wycherley and Kleyn being out of sync. The key detail here is the timing of the back lift with the jump.

Ideally, the back lifter’s feet plant a heartbeat before the launch into the air to make sure that the lift gets as much velocity as possible. Wycherley and Kleyn got their timing wrong here.

On this one, I think a concussed Oli Jager — he got a bang off the deck on a carry a few moments before — led to this one getting lost with no lift.

He went off on the next play, but it’s the kind of thing that kills momentum.

A few moments later, we had a very good 5m lineout opportunity off the back of a previous set that had forced a yellow card to one of the Edinburgh replacement locks.

This is a slow lift, but it’s not helped by O’Donoghue leaving a little too much ground to cover from his hinge position.

That’s three steps to the plant — and it’s right on the spot where Edinburgh’s only other lock is guarding.

I’d have liked this call to go to Wycherley at the back, but that’s easy to say sitting in my kitchen watching it back on a laptop. All told, we were a little slow across the ground and into the air in that first half, even allowing for some verging on illegal lineout and maul defence from Edinburgh at times.

This one looked a little like a mixture of a poor throw, slow lift and jump and a missed window that someone like Tom Ahern — who was due to play here before stray boot in training put him out — takes in his sleep.

That lineout issue was common in the first half, along with our attacking phases looking more than a little flat and disjointed. That was to be expected, in some ways. Smith, Haley, Farrell, O’Brien, and Nash were all playing with each other for the first time this season, and they looked to be really out of sync with Hanrahan and Patterson, who both looked hurried and hassled for the first hour of this contest.

This is a good example.

Two decent hit-ups, albeit with slow delivery on the last one and then a scripted play, but running into a defence that was solidly expecting it or, if they weren’t, found themselves in an easy position to squash it.

This was a high-risk start-up phase that was designed to generate this tight overload on the reset, but it left too much work to be done to secure the ruck on landing.

The timing and intent were off; Edinburgh won the turnover and went down the field.

Those timing issues continued into the second half, with a really good second-phase strike play design falling apart because of Diarmuid Barron and Tom Farrell getting in each other’s way.

Those first two phases are really sharp, and the designed linebreak compacts Edinburgh perfectly. It creates a massive overlap on the left edge and you can see what happens.

This is a lack of cohesion. It’s a perfect example of it, actually. Barron is running a blocking line, but that line is almost always in Farrell’s passing lane.

But we want to play an 80-minute game, and we’re fit enough to push anyone into deep waters coming that 70-minute mark. Edinburgh had sunk a ton of energy into their defensive collisions and scrummaging, which, coupled with their edgy discipline, meant gaps were always going to show in the last twenty minutes, and show they did.

With Edwin Edogbo on the field, their tiring forwards found very little give in the maul and, on two key occasions, a man they couldn’t sack on our shove. That created a platform.

With that platform, we started to find gaps in the centre and on the short side, with Tom Farrell assisting one key linebreak that should have ended in a try before doing so again on a play that earned another Edinburgh yellow card, before Mikey Milne powered home for his second of the night.

Back in it.

When the 70th minute hit, Edinburgh committed another daft penalty on a kick chase to give Munster a kick into the 22. An infringement at the top of the jump gave us a ladder of our own to the 5m line and, four points down, it was time to execute.

We did so with real menace and smarts around the offensive breakdown. Ethan Coughlan — who was super sharp when he came on — moved us to the right of the Edinburgh 5m line and set up three punishing carries close to the line.

Watch how we clean “in” towards the posts to stagger the Edinburgh defensive fold and give Brian Gleeson the platform for a carry that deserved a try all on it’s own, before leaving a short carry for Fineen Wycherley to snatch the lead back.

Powerful, emphatic cleans set up the space for Brian Gleeson to hit the line like a sledgehammer.

Munster had another try disallowed after this, which would have made the last few minutes far more comfortable than they ultimately transpired to be. The officials found a knock-on that even Edinburgh weren’t shouting for, and that gave Edinburgh that ladder to run up the field. A scrum penalty on the 5m line, a badly timed swipe at the resulting lineout designed to force a knock-on to end the game, but resulted in another penalty and then last gasp maul defence on an Edinburgh shove that rumbled into the Munster 22.

It was Jack O’Donoghue who got his hands through the maul to force the turnover and end the game. I tried not to sigh in relief too loudly on the radio, let’s put it that way.

***

I put this game fully into the bracket of “we’d have lost this last season”, and not just because we actually did lose this last season. Every single metric on the stat sheet after the game read like a Munster loss.

Lineout sub-80%? Less than two points on average per entry? Scrum leaking penalties? Early injury disruption to Jager and Haley, forcing a rejig? Hanrahan kicking poorly off the tee all night? Key players rested?

We know how that usually ends, especially against a dangerous opponent loaded up with their internationals, but it somehow… didn’t. Munster didn’t play well here, at all, and it needed Edinburgh’s discipline to implode plus a healthy impact off the bench to do the job, but do the job it did.

That alone is a sign of this squad’s floor-raising quite a bit.

This week, however, will be all about the ceiling.

This game was all about Tom Farrell and a massive, game-winning bench impact.

Farrell has had a frustrating start to the season with a troublesome calf injury keeping him out of the first two games, but he was back with a bang here and up to his usual tricks with real creativity and some of the best square-shoulder running you’ll see anywhere in the club game last weekend. Sure, he runs a bit like late-stage Johnny Sexton — not sure if this is derogatory or not — but he’s almost impossible to read when he does so. Is he passing? Is he carrying? I’ve watched the game back a few times now, and even when I know what he does, it’s only ever apparent as he’s doing it.

A quality operator with a valuable role to play this year.

Dan Kelly, off the bench, looked really good in our #12 jersey and showcased everything I thought he’d show in that role; hard carrying, huge ruck output, and great defence. I still think it’s Kelly and Nankivell as our #1 pairing this year, but Kelly can work really well with either man, in either midfield slot. A very subtle level-raiser already.

Josh Wycherley has shown real value off the bench in the last game or two, and he did again here with a very busy cameo that showcased how he can help balance out an end-game. He painted a good picture on our loosehead side when Boan Venter had John Ryan in a lot of trouble.

Coughlan and Butler have been criticised quite a bit on these pages in the last year or so, but this was arguably the best we’ve seen from either man. Coughlan was sharp around the ruck and gave us a decent platform to play off, and Butler, who was trusted with an end game that we were losing when he came on the field, showed real bottle and nerve with the ball in hand when called upon. Encouraging.

Brian Gleeson’s under-20 career for Ireland has given him a lot to live up to as a senior pro, but this week was a good example of what he might become as he steps up through the levels. He’s incredibly strong, yes, and big, but his big strength is his speed in combination with those qualities. When he gets any kind of space to work with, he’s a tough man to stop.

Edwin Edogbo has had a tough two years. Actually, tough doesn’t cut it. A nightmare. His torn Achilles against Leinster in 2023 marked the beginning of a long road to recovery for the Cobh man that only properly ended on Friday night. In that time, he’s been the most asked about man in Munster, outside of a brief period when Jack Crowley’s contract was up in the air. Why? Because anyone with a pair of eyes that can see knows how special a player he can be. Who else is bullying a South African pack at 20 years of age? Who else is going toe-to-toe with anointed “big” players with bigger reputations and fighting them to a standstill when he was still in the academy?

Edwin Edogbo. The Notorious Big E. And, if you ask me, the best lock prospect in the country in 20 years or more. The big question will be his fitness, and keeping him fit, but this cameo off the bench after two years out tells you all you need to know.

Stopping a maul dead on the infield side and then on the recovery? Stopping Boan Venter — recently capped Springbok — behind the gainline? Going through three Edinburgh forwards to get over the gainline under the posts?

If he stays fit, there’s no level he can’t go to. None. He’s that good.