A few years ago – 3 years and 7 months ago, to be exact – I met Johann Van Graan for a coffee and a chat in Cork. He was in the city anyway on Munster business. This was right before the 2019 Rugby World Cup and the hiring of Stephen Larkham and Graham Rowntree had already been announced, but the pursuit of Damian De Allende and RG Snyman was yet to come to fruition.
We spoke for the guts of an hour and a half about rugby and about Munster specifically. This was the foundational piece of evidence I had that Johann Van Graan was a gentleman, and sure, there was an element of plámásing me involved – these things are always transactional, to an extent – he was a genuinely lovely guy who would continue to show that for the next few years. Whatever about how it worked out here on-field, I will always root for Johann Van Graan’s success, not just because of that meeting but because of every other instance in which we interacted where he didn’t have to be as sound as he was – I’m just a content creator after all – but sound he was, every single time without fail.
One of the things we spoke about on that day was Munster’s desire to change up elements of what we were doing from an attacking perspective, with one of the core elements of that being “opening our shoulders up” and playing a game that had more offloads in it.
That season we finished 7th in the offload count. We kicked really long and with a lot of volume, won the second most defensive turnovers in the league while having the best lineout in the competition that year, with a more than passable scrummaging performance. Offensively, we were pretty good in that we scored a lot of tries and points (third and second overall respectively) but most of the ways we beat up teams came through the lineout. Then COVID-19 hit. Remember that?
The next season was broadly the same. We were still 7th overall for offloads thrown and still high up in the charts for our kicking volume, with shorter kick metres built in as we went a little more contestable to up the visibility of our breakdown threats. We had more lineouts than anyone in the league that year but our completion rate went way down, so overall scoring production went with it. We scored fewer tries because we weren’t able to use our maul as effectively on the whole across the season.
Last season, things degraded even further and offloads were the least of our worries. Why focus on offloads? Well, offloads are often – wrongly, in my view – seen as a barometer of what is considered Good Attacking Rugby. It’s my contention that you can’t just decide to play that way. Munster decided to go down this path in 2019 but it’s only now beginning to bear fruit because the framework is there to make it work. From 2019 to 2022, we trained offloads but didn’t really have a system designed to consistently reward them. This was the conflicting duopoly of Van Graan’s Munster in that we understood what we had to do offensively to beat bigger teams but we weren’t capable of untethering that from our wider, chimeric game approach which always seemed more reactive than proactive.
This is from last season, for example, was a good example of what Munster were capable of against the right opposition.
OFFLOAD
PARTY#SUAF pic.twitter.com/Mf652mgI8A— Three Red Kings (@threeredkings) March 5, 2022
That’s more or less a year ago. So why are the offloads and expansivity we saw in this game against the Ospreys any different or more significant? Because they are a core part of Munster’s attacking strategy and the wider framework of play we have adopted. In this new way of playing, offloads aren’t something that happens ad hoc, they seem to be a schemed component. Mike Prendergast has taken the foundations and half-built ideas of what came before as the new attack coach and turned it into a really well-drilled attack that isn’t even close to hitting its peak and is already showing real results.
In the 3-2-X system that we used on phase play last season, there wasn’t much scope for offloading as a core component. You’d see it in flashes but only as a way to finish a wider surge. 3-2-X is layered, ultimately, so the lines for running offloads schematically aren’t there in settled phase play unless there’s a line break.
In a 3-3-1 phase shape with a free-moving backline – a backline that isn’t integrated behind layered pods, there is more scope for passing out of the tackle consistently. As a result, this season Munster have offloaded 129 times BEFORE this game against Ospreys, which is enough for third in the league behind Zebre and the Stormers. The presence of the bottom team in the league alongside the current champions and second-placed team in the league in that previous stat will go some way to explaining to you how a lot of offloads (or a high PPC ratio) don’t necessarily correlate with success.
It is Munster’s hope – and design – that it does for us.
Here’s a good idea of what I mean by (a) a free-moving backline and (b) how a 3-3-1 phase shape plays into a game where offloading becomes part of the structure, not an ad-hoc extension to an attacking sequence.
The intent to offload out of the tackle to an overload of backs, primarily, is a core part of this play. The concept hinges on it. Antoine Frisch is running an offload line. He isn’t hedging his running line to act as a ruck support player – that’s what O’Donoghue is there for as the first option – he’s running that line to take a pass out of the tackle and when he gets it, Frisch has the ball in him to keep it moving to O’Donoghue who can snap into a running line after he’s covered the potential ruck entry.
But this was far from the only example.
From there, the game was done. The second half felt a little like the Ospreys making business decisions in defence but Munster never stopped pushing and ran up a massive score that’s worth another match point when it comes to points difference come the end of the season. +55 points in one game is great going in anyone’s language and that will have an effect at the end of the season.
Some of the rugby I saw from Munster here was really really cutting edge and bordering on undefendable in places. Munster have put test window Welsh sides to the wall like this plenty of times before but this is the first time I’ve seen this Munster team absolutely tear up an opponent purely through our action in the backs. Munster have beaten up teams and mauled them to pieces for years but this… this was different. We on-balled and counter-transitioned the Ospreys to a standstill, cut them to shreds with our backline and still left around four or five scores out there.
Beating this Ospreys side is not notable, given the circumstances. How we beat them is incredibly notable because I can’t remember the last time it happened.
If these trends continue – forget about the Ospreys for a minute – that is incredibly encouraging, especially with two more very winnable home games to come.
A really good display, regardless of the opposition’s issues.
| Names | Rating |
|---|---|
| Josh Wycherley | ★★★★ |
| Niall Scannell | ★★★★ |
| Roman Salanoa | ★★★★ |
| Jean Kleyn | ★★★★ |
| Fineen Wycherley | ★★★★ |
| Jack O'Donoghue | ★★★ |
| John Hodnett | ★★★★★ |
| Gavin Coombes | ★★★★★ |
| Paddy Patterson | ★★★★★ |
| Joey Carbery | ★★★★ |
| Simon Zebo | ★★★★ |
| Malakai Fekitoa | ★★★★★ |
| Antoine Frisch | ★★★★★ |
| Liam Coombes | ★★★★ |
| Shane Daly | ★★★★ |
| Diarmuid Barron | ★★★★ |
| Mark Donnelly | ★★★ |
| Stephen Archer | ★★★ |
| Jack O'Sullivan | ★★★★ |
| Alex Kendellen | ★★★★ |
| Ethan Coughlan | ★★★★ |
| Ben Healy | ★★★★ |
| Rory Scannell | ★★★ |
