Northampton 34 Munster 32

Parellel Lines

On one hand, this was one of the best performances of the season but, in an another, it shows the gap we have to plug in the squad to progress in the short and medium term.

Quality of Opposition

Match Importance

Performance

Attack

Defence

Set Piece

3.8

This was, at once, a great Munster performance and one that might have fit earlier in the season away to the Sharks or the Stormers.

Earlier in the season, we were poor, yes, but we didn’t quite have the firepower in attack to counterbalance our set piece and defensive issues. Against Northampton, we showcased a lot of the highly technical, precise and somewhat undefendable attacking work that we are built to execute. When we execute it well, it puts much of the creative focus onto Jack Crowley as a complete attacking threat and he really is that good.

But here – and not for the first time this season or last – we were sliced at the heel again and again by errors on both sides of the ball.

Northampton’s first try, for example. First of all – we’re in this 5m defensive position in the first place due to an unforced error at the lineout when Peter O’Mahony and Diarmuid Barron couldn’t connect on an uncontested jump. When you’re on your own 5m line, depth is your friend, width is your enemy and keeping numbers on their feet is imperative.

So that means picking your targets early and trusting the inside defender to make the stop. That didn’t happen here.

No defence coach on the planet is telling Mike Haley to jump in on Ramm in this instance. I think the decision at that moment was clear or had to be; it’s shooting out to close the gap on Seabrook, leaving Nash to cover Ramm with a brief jockey to read Ramm’s body language.

That leaves a tough tackle for Haley and a lot of ground to cover. Maybe Seabrook knocks on under pressure, maybe he doesn’t – but you get there. Easy for a bald goon like me to write, sure.

But most of the damage was done a phase before. We simply can’t lose a collision so passively in this area of the field. We lost Barron and Wycherley from the next phase of defence with no slowdown on Northampton’s ball.

Mistakes mean tougher choices.

All through the game we were giving up soft collisions in defence. This sequence came directly from a Munster exit that should have been in the Northampton half, instead of just inside our 10m line; a slice by Scannell costly at the worst possible moment.

Northampton went over and back across the field and found this wide space. Yes, we’re down a centre field defender in Coombes but how are we leaving that pillar so unguarded? O’Mahony loses a collision with Augustus, Jager trips over it, we’re scrambling and they end up with a huge openside that they end up scoring from.

Haley is left with another option to shoot out on Seabrook but he cuts in. Seabrook scores in corner.

A few minutes later, a pretty harsh penalty on Beirne put Northampton in place for a big maul drive. Again, accepting that our maul defence in that area was pretty soft, I look at the defensive set off the maul and think that Scannell has to make that tackle on Ramm covering across. Any defence is defined by that inside man cover – you have to trust it, and they have to deliver.

This tackle attempt just isn’t good enough on a scramble across. We need more in this position from whoever is delivering the moment.

We have good players. Niall Scannell – who I’ve highlighted here negatively and will do again in a minute – is a good player. What we don’t have a lot of is elite calibre athletes by the standards of the modern game. Ronan Kelleher, Malcolm Marx, Julien Marchand, and Dan Sheehan probably, on the balance of averages, make that tackle. It’s a non-sequitur, I know, none of those guys were playing here, but that’s the difference.

Good players see what they probably should do in any given situation but the modern game moves so fast that if they can’t get into position quickly enough – or adjust if they pick one of two possible reads and get the wrong one – you give up line breaks, lose collisions and concede tries.

What turned out to be the Saints’ winning try came from this, coupled with some bad injury luck forcing a positional restructure at the set piece. First the obvious; Scannell steps across to allow Gleeson to cover Butler inside, and then can’t recover back across. Second, Haley covers the posts but then stumbles as he tries to cover back across and Seabrook scorches him.

Look a little closer though, and you see how it happened.

Nash’s failed HIA meant that Butler replaced him and that pushed Crowley to fullback. In the Munster defensive system, the fullback covers the outside edge while the right winger – depending on the side of the field where the lineout takes place – covers the inside ball behind the lineout. Crowley, as the new acting fullback on defence, was where Haley would be defending and Haley is covering where Nash would be.

Butler is quite a weak tackler and when you stack him with Rory Scannell – another player who isn’t a lockdown defender at the set piece – I think Niall Scannell wanted to get out to Gleeson as soon as possible to allow him to push into the #10 channel to protect Butler. When the ball came back inside, Scannell just couldn’t adjust and, because we competed in the air, no defenders were covering across.

Does Nash get hands-on Seabrook here? Probably, yeah. Haley looks to have lost some of his top-end acceleration and pace in the last year or so. It happens to every player in the back three once they start hitting the thirties anyway, but particularly when they had a hip operation, as Haley had last season. Maybe that explains the bite-ins too.

Until we have those key parts of our squad rounded out, moments like this will keep happening. I fully believe that they know exactly what they should be doing but the dynamics of the game punish any misread ruthlessly when you get to high-level games.

It’s very hard to win any game when you concede 34 points but we made a good go of it all the same.

I keep looking back at that ten-point lead we had around 39 minutes and wonder about what might have been if we’d had a bit more control during the five-minute block right before and the four five-minute blocks just after halftime. It seems like every time we had a chance to nail down some territory and build pressure on Northampton with a lead, we loosened our grip.

Jager getting stripped and then giving away a penalty on back-to-back plays was a killer, in the grand scheme of things, and highlights some of the things that Ian Costello was so angry with after the game.

“To be fair I think they deserved it, I think they capitalised really well on the yellow card, that period just before and after half-time. They scored 12 points, and we struggled to get our hands on the ball in the third quarter and we knew that was going to be really important. So I suppose it gave them a lead, we got close enough in the end but I think the bottom line is we weren’t good enough tonight and didn’t deserve to win it.”

The tantalizing thing is that stretches of this game showed what this group is capable of going forward, without a massive forward power platform. This is not a Munster pack that, right now, is battering teams in the near spaces with their physicality but they can, with the right momentum, work the opposition around the field.

This is a great example;

Lovely hands, lovely lines and while I’d really like to see Barron finishing off this linebreak directly, the skill set to create the space is something else.

I think we’ll need a fit again Roman Salanoa doing a 50/30 with Jager, Edwin Edogbo and Jean Kleyn to properly have a crack off bullying teams physically in the near spaces but we’re capable of playing with that kind of skillset. We also have to take the knock-ons and errors that will always come with it, regardless of the skill level.

The frustrating thing is that a win was 100% there for us here and the manner of the loss will really stick in the throat, at least for a day or two. I know it still does with me on Monday. I suppose that this game – and this season so far has shown us – is that our first choice 23/25 can pretty much go toe-to-toe with anyone in Europe on our day, but we really can’t afford to ship our current injury list and look to compete like for like.

We need guys like Casey, Kleyn, Edogbo, Salanoa, Loughman, Abrahams, Daly and Nankivell to be in these squads on the bigger days. We don’t have the squad depth for that. We’ve had to cut our cloth to suit our measure, yes, but when the measure changes dramatically during the season you’re going to find yourself exposed.

We’re close – very close – but we need more guys back to go closer again. These two points worked to create a Round of 16 game away to La Rochelle and while that is a massive challenge, I genuinely don’t think there’s a team in Europe that Munster should be afraid of if we can get anything close to that first-choice squad selection on the field. Our destiny is in our hands, and in the treatment room.

Either way though, l’opportunité c’est fucking énorme.