I was at a 50th birthday party – not mine, I add hastily – on Saturday evening so, instead of watching this game with my laptop in front of me and a never-ending stream of interaction coming in through my Tweetdeck columns and Discord, I instead got to watch this as God intended if you couldn’t make it to Thomond Park – tucking into a few pints in a rural pub.
I’d promised myself I’d only have two, of course, because I was working the morning after but there I was on pint five going ballistic when Niall Scannell barged over off the back of a maul for the bonus point try with a bunch of other lads I’d just met.
Nobody told these lads in a small village in north Kerry that they don’t have a connection with Munster Rugby. They didn’t get the memo from the lads living up in Dublin, I guess.
That’s the beauty of these interpros in that you can’t help but feel something, especially against a side like Connacht who we’ve struggled with as of late. They came fully loaded, and so did we and, in the end, we landed a bonus point win that should have been far more comfortable than it was.
Not a bad night’s work. It was far from perfect, of course, and you can see the little janky issues that are still costing us, just not to the same degree that they were at the start of the season. Some of this is the group becoming more comfortable with the overarching framework we’re playing but a lot of it is the core group of 10 guys that we were planning on building around this season being back in the harness consistently along with the injury list that dominated the start of the season easing a little.
Time, plus consistency of availability, plus consistent time on the field = better performances.
It’s stupidly obvious but it’s no shock that since the Emerging Ireland group came back ahead of the Leinster game and the injury list has lightened a little, performances have been gradually improving to a point we can recognise more of what we’re trying to do onfield.
This game was dominated by two facets of the game – the scrum and Munster’s reaction to counter-transition. Given the conditions, there was always going to be a lot of scrummaging and Connacht are one of the trickiest sides in the league in this area of the game.
Denis Buckley is absolutely key for them because he’s the archetypical short, squat nuggety loosehead with the perfect body type for hiding bores and years of experience. Connacht have leaned into this with a gimmick that will outfox most referee’s in the league.
They use their loosehead/hooker unit (the loosehead, hooker, loosehead lock and flanker) to step around and bore in while Bealham starts low and legal on the tighthead side before popping up to allow the angle from Buckley and Heffernan space to move into.
It’s devilishly clever and Munster’s adjustments weren’t really effective. Our communication with the referee wasn’t great either because we weren’t able to highlight what Connacht were up to. To me, that’s good scrummaging and if the referee isn’t seeing it, keep at it. To be honest, I think our ability to hang onto the ball without giving up errors in the late part of the game was the biggest part of preventing the scrum from costing us the game. One way or another, though, it’ll be a good learning experience for our young front row that started and that lesson is this; sometimes the adjustments don’t work because the ref makes the decisions.
This isn’t a “fuck the ref” screed either – I was using yellow circles long before Rassie – I’m mainly showing it to illustrate how hard this game is to officiate and how complex and involved the scrum is. It really was a fascinating battle.
The other key part of the game was counter-transition. We knew that Connacht would kick long off #9 and #10 because they kick longer than anyone in the league and they did so again here, as we expected. We tailored our back five selection to match this aspect of Connacht’s game. If they were going to kick long to us, that means we were going to have an opportunity to run back these kicks but, as we know, a key part of Connacht’s counter-transition game is kicking long and packing the first few zones a transition runner is likely to hit with excellent poachers like Oliver, Butler, Aki, Bealham and Heffernan.
Defensively, we knew that we could contain Connacht because they just aren’t a very dangerous phase-play team at the moment but their counter-transition schemes are dangerous. They kick long, you run it back, they make the tackle, get a poacher in over the ball and you’ve conceded a penalty around your 10m line.
We conceded a killer three points directly from that very tactic in the Sportsground so how would we approach it? With two small forwards in the back row that could cover the near drop and the far drop. What do I mean by drop? Well, when the opposition start a counter-transition sequence it’s often with the defensive line in pretty close quarters so when they launch the kick deep, you need players to “drop” into a position where they can either be an option on transition or, primarily, secure that first ruck in transition. If you can do that against Connacht, they will leave a compressed space outside their transition “press” that you can exploit. You can see it in this shortened sequence here where Kendellen and Hodnett drop into the middle space off a kick through and who’s on the scene to secure the ruck? Hodnett. What’s on the outside? Compressed Connacht defenders post-transition.
This was far from the only example, though.
That’s a selection tailored to “break” a counter-transition team and while it wasn’t perfect, it showed real potential and we were a few bounces of the ball, a few better hands and a few better decisions away from scoring directly on one or two of these.
That alone is really encouraging because we weren’t approaching our transition game with the same structure and intent last season. We selected specifically to nullify a core threat of Connacht’s and, if we’d had a sharper adjustment at the scrum, I find it difficult to see what Connacht could have hurt us with outside of the now typical Munster error leading directly to a Connacht try that we’ve given up in every single home game against them in the last three years.
All that is quite encouraging, as is the incremental improvement in the lineout which, while still a work in progress, isn’t the game-killer it was a few rounds ago. There is still a lot of road to travel there though, as there is with our overall framework but what I’m seeing excites me.
Putting away Connacht like this is no easy feat and the bonus point we earned put us right back into the conversation for a top-eight finish on a weekend where all the positional flux I expected happened to order. There’ll be more of that as the season continues and a real opportunity to sneak into a top-four spot if we can keep performances where they need to be and core players out of the rehab room.
The real worry here was stepping out at home for the first time after the South Africa game and enduring a vibe-killing loss that would have been as deflating as Páirc Uí Chaoimh was uplifting but we ground it out when we needed to. Sure, we lost control of the game in the last 10 minutes in a manner that put a gloss on the scoreboard that Connacht didn’t really deserve in my opinion but this was decent, even good at times, and all I want now is more.
| Names | Rating |
|---|---|
| Josh Wycherley | ★★ |
| Diarmuid Barron | ★★★★ |
| Roman Salanoa | ★★★ |
| Tadhg Beirne | ★★★★ |
| Jean Kleyn | ★★★★ |
| Peter O'Mahony | ★★★ |
| John Hodnett | ★★★★★ |
| Alex Kendellen | ★★★★ |
| Craig Casey | ★★★★★ |
| Joey Carbery | ★★★★ |
| Shane Daly | ★★★ |
| Rory Scannell | ★★★ |
| Antoine Frisch | ★★★★ |
| Calvin Nash | ★★★★ |
| Mike Haley | ★★★ |
| Niall Scannell | ★★★ |
| Jeremy Loughman | ★★★★ |
| John Ryan | ★★★ |
| Edwin Edogbo | ★★★ |
| Jack O'Donoghue | ★★★ |
| Paddy Patterson | DNP |
| Jack Crowley | ★★★ |
| Gavin Coombes | ★★★ |
