Munster lost this game three times.
Once before the game, right before halftime and finally mid-way through an unlikely comeback in the second half.
It’s hard to know where to start regarding things going wrong in this game. The wrong team and team graphics were read out before the game – it was the teamsheet from the Ospreys game at Thomond Park a few weeks prior – to the point that people were asking me in the stands if Snyman and numerous others had been injured in the warmup. There was no half-lap from the players after the warmup who, to a man, looked hurried and downbeat as they jogged back down the tunnel.
Vibes looked off, almost from the get-go.
I saw that with this team early in the season and it was an unwelcome visitor here, like that guy you were sat next to at that wedding last year showing up at your house for the visit you said ye should organise when you were eight pints deep just so you could get away from him.
He’s at the door with a six-pack of Carlsberg, he’s already downed one on the way – this is not going to be pleasant. That sense of impending unpleasantness was something that I couldn’t shake from early in this game. The opening sequence of attack off a turnover looked a little stiff and overly complex, almost like it had to be to make it work. The bad vibes were only enhanced by Fineen Wycherley spilling the ball in contact inside the opening minute, which Glasgow duly kicked long up the field.
When I saw Munster concede a not-straight lineout infringement and then a penalty off the resulting scrum only to be run over the tryline from the resulting close-range lineout, I got the vibe of that wedding visitor pulling out his phone an hour in to show me an eleven-minute-long Youtube video that he swears is hilarious. It will not be. They will be the longest 11 minutes of my life.
I just got the impression that Munster started this game undercooked and not just at the whistle, in the warmup. It then continued into that bad start and instead of just getting back into system, we seemed to start forcing it en masse.
At just 0-7 down, the simple pass here was to Fekitoa, but Daly throws a skip pass on a short windup to chase the man in space.
We’ve run this phase play stack all season long but you see Haley’s a little janky with his alignment as the pinch runner and, for me, Daly just doesn’t have the time to throw a pass that long with such a short windup.
Forcing it.
Munster were on advantage though so you can excuse gunning for the killer pass with a mulligan in the back pocket. Munster would be held up – a little controversially – off the resulting tap penalty. Post-goal line dropout, we were back to making the kind of mistakes we hoped we left back in October.
These two examples happened in the same sequence of possession.
When you see a “flying nothing” pass like this, it’s normally down to two things; catastrophic passing error from the scrumhalf or sub-standard communication from your primary playmaker. Yes, you could look at Kilcoyne filing into the “inside barrel” spot of this three-pod late acting as a distraction to Patterson, who would scan for options before addressing the ball and passing to what he saw on the first look
With the pod shifting between the first look and the address of the ball, this kind of error happens but usually only in a situation where the forwards are not being properly driven from the screen. No one even has their hands up to catch this ball, so who was the pass target? Where was the animation from earlier in the season to sell multiple options?
See what I mean about vibes being off?
We managed to recover the ball on this, only to almost cough up an intercept after a wobbly pass from Fekitoa to the outside of a three pod.
When we managed to recover that Patterson coughed up the obvious play here, which was to kick the ball long down into the Glasgow 22 where they had absolutely no cover. Once again, this passage screamed about a team out of sync, playing quietly and then making panicked grabs at big plays early when the start was bad.
We were looking for width to get to the edge, Glasgow knew this, cut off our possession supply lines with outside-in blitz pressure and put huge pressure on our ability to force compressions.
Essentially, once the ball moved to our back structures, Glasgow knew that our passing would have to be flawless to get around their edge pressure – it was not. This comes down to our mix at 10/12/13 which just didn’t work. Yes, part of this is down to injury and other issues reducing our usable depth in midfield but we seemed to be running on default mode when it came to our set-piece plays. Crowley is an athletic #10 and is a robust carrier for a primarily creative player but is he the right guy to be crashing this one up off a scum launch right on the line of our #22 when Fekitoa is right there?
Should Crowley have done better regardless? Absolutely. He gets a bit unlucky with the bounce off the grass dislodging the ball but use a knife to hammer a nail into a wall and you’ll get substandard results. It just seems like a badly called play that didn’t reflect that we had two #10s on the field.
During phase play, for example, there was very little difference between Crowley and Carbery when it comes to working at first receiver but the big difference came on the option taking for whoever was outside. Glasgow pressured the second pass really well because they only had to worry so much about our ability to hurt them once we used a screen or a stack.
Munster’s 3-3-X system means that you have a forward or forwards (plural) to use as assets to hold the edge and screen action to hold the centre-field defence which creates a zone of “flux” that spreads from the touchline to around 2om infield. A lot of what Munster have done well this season comes from bouncing teams between the 15m tramlines, unbalancing them and then exploiting that imbalance with play action and options.
We didn’t get that in the first half, instead, we got confusion and a feeling that there was no connection or effective communication between our scrumhalf, halfback and other playmakers.
Paddy Patterson had a poor game that didn’t justify his selection on form but it can’t all be on him. Going back through the game the forwards produced pretty decent possession, we just couldn’t utilise it effectively as we have done since we got our act together offensively post-October.
That improvement was nowhere to be seen in the first half of this game and when it was followed up with your captain making unforced errors at critical points in the game like this;
It feels like nothing is going right. Your leaders need to stand up and make big plays in moments like this. When things are going wrong you need those players to drive things on – not just talk about it, but to go out there and do it. Anyone can knock on a ball off a pick and go – it happens to the best players – but when you’re 0-21 down at home in Thomond Park and you need something, anything to get the engine running you expect your on-field captain to nail this.
After he knocked it on, Glasgow were whooping and hollering at the big moment they just won right before halftime. We were standing like strangers to each other. No energy. We could barely look at each other.
Guess what happened at the ensuing scrum? Penalty Glasgow. We looked like a beaten docket.
You can get away with a misfiring offence as long as your defence is set but we seem to have regressed there too. Glasgow went after our front row rearrangement consistently off the scrum launch and used it to score their second try. Watch for the energy here – or lack of it – from Patterson and the confusing defensive comms from O’Donoghue.
There’s some off-scheme “I’m getting my shit in” stuff there too that kills this defensive set but it shows the level of uncertainty and skittishness that was out there on both sides of the ball. Glasgow knew where they might catch us, but it was our poor reads, poor defensive comms and poor folds that did the damage.
We started the second half with a rocket up us but even then, the first five minutes had more of the same issues.
Patterson and Carbery looked like they had a miscommunication right from the restart, which lead to a brutal box kick exit. Patterson was remonstrating with a silent Carbery immediately after.
Munster recovered from that to put together a cohesive series of phases for the first time all game and a smart kick from Daly at the edge gave us a shot at attacking the Glasgow lineout and putting them under pressure for once.
A miscommunication from our counter-jumping core – O’Donoghue and Kleyn in particular – meant it was an uncontested take for Glasgow and an easy exit.
They stole the next lineout and scored a killer drop goal on the sequence that came after, which included Fekitoa getting thrown to the ground like a child might throw their schoolbag on a Friday evening when they get home.
That was the game right there.
Munster brought on Casey straight after this and saw an immediate lift in tempo, clarity and drive. There was a leader on the pitch and the players and the crowd reacted.
We scored two tries in quick succession between the 50th and 58th minute, almost on back-to-back possessions. With some solidity, clarity and renewed energy – the crowd was really up at this point, having been stunned into silence by the atrocious first half – it was more than possible for Munster to score another try that would have brought it back to a 10 point deficit and a two-score game.
Then we lost the game for the third and final time with a baffling play from Joey Carbery off the restart.
This pass was always forward and if Coombes didn’t dive to catch it, it’s likely Glasgow would have scored directly under the posts. They’d score off the resulting scrum platform right outside our 5m line a few minutes later though, and this was another self-inflicted wound to go with all the others. Carbery was taken off soon after.
Crowley moved to #10 and was an immediate improvement when it came to actual effectiveness and directness.
But the game was gone by that point and while we finished with a try bonus point that means “all” we need on our tour to South Africa is three match points against the Sharks and the Stormers to ensure a playoff run and European Champions Cup rugby next season.
I think this team can do that.
It’s far more comforting to me to assume that we bottled this first half – almost a continuance of the second half against the Scarlets – as opposed to just not being good enough to keep it competitive against a rotated Glasgow side in Thomond Park. That appeals to me more than saying that this team just isn’t good enough to stop Glasgow from scoring a bonus point before halftime.
All the same, it shows how much development is still needed in this group and that getting to where we want to go isn’t a nine-month job, it’s a two-off-season job, at least.
Big week coming up.
| Names | Rating |
|---|---|
| Dave Kilcoyne | ★ |
| Diarmuid Barron | ★★ |
| Roman Salanoa | ★★★ |
| Jean Kleyn | ★★★ |
| Fineen Wycherley | ★★★ |
| Jack O'Donoghue | ★ |
| John Hodnett | ★★★★ |
| Gavin Coombes | ★★★ |
| Paddy Patterson | ★★ |
| Joey Carbery | ★★ |
| Shane Daly | ★★★ |
| Jack Crowley | ★★★ |
| Malakai Fekitoa | ★ |
| Calvin Nash | ★★★★★ |
| Mike Haley | ★★★ |
| Scott Buckley | ★★★ |
| Josh Wycherley | ★★★ |
| Stephen Archer | ★★★ |
| RG Snyman | ★★★ |
| Alex Kendellen | ★★★★ |
| Craig Casey | ★★★★ |
| Rory Scannell | ★★★ |
| Simon Zebo | ★★★ |
