The simple truth of rugby is that you’ve got to win offensive collisions somewhere if you want to win most games.
Those collisions can be close to the ruck, hit-ups in midfield or out wide but if they don’t punch a hole somewhere, you’ll eventually run out of viable options and be forced to kick reset at best or lose possession at worst. As defences get stronger and more organised it’s never been more important to have players that can (a) commit multiple defenders to a fixed point or (b) run right through those defenders if needs be.
I’ve been speaking about size an awful lot over the last few weeks and to clarify, I’m not just talking about height and weight. These are important factors in professional rugby but they clearly aren’t everything on their own when it comes to the effective carrying of the ball into the defence.
Ngani Laumape is, for example, one of the heaviest midfield hitters playing the game today and he’s around 5’7″. I mean, he’s around 110kg too, but height on its own isn’t a factor in how strong Laumape is when he’s attacking the line. When I’m talking about “size”, I’m really talking about a players ball carrying power – the ability to accelerate your mass past the defenders on the gainline – and the stopping power that comes with that on the other side of the ball.
Marcell Coetzee, for example, is 6’4″ and 114kg. Stephen Archer, just to pick a random forward from our pack, is 6’2″ and 120kg. Archer is only 2″ shorter than Coetzee and is billed as being 6kg heavier. Who is the bigger ball carrier of the two? It’s Coetzee, obviously.
So size, when it comes to projecting force onto the opposition, isn’t just about height and weight. It’s more complex than that when we talk about power athletes. Every pro rugby player is an athlete but not every rugby player is a power athlete. These are top-level guys like Manu Tuilagi, Ngani Laumape, Damien De Allende, James Lowe, Billy Vunipola, Tadhg Furlong, Marcell Coetzee, Virimi Vakatawa, Stuart McCloskey, CJ Stander, Andrew Porter, Maro Itoje, Dan Leavy, James Ryan, Dave Kilcoyne – I could go on.
The fewer of these power athletes you have, the harder it is to play the game.
They can’t be the only part of your game, but they make compressing the opponent’s defence that much easier and when you put a few big heavy men alongside them for support, it makes it easier to develop a regular source of good possession to build your attack off. If you want to offload, or roll of your midfield, or go wide-wide to come back across the field it’s all so much easier if you have multiple ball-carrying threats in key areas of the pitch during settled phase play.
Over the last few weeks, Munster have suffered offensively and defensively without access to all of our key power athletes – Farrell, Kilcoyne, Kleyn, Stander and Botha. We have got a few lads who look like they’ve got the right stuff to be those players for us in a season or two – Wycherley, Coombes, Knox, O’Sullivan, etc – but right now, we’re incredibly reliant on the platform that these five players give us as a unit, both from the start and then off the bench.
The biggest loss week on week has been, in my opinion, Chris Farrell. Farrell is our attacking anchor, especially off the lineout.
Here’s an example, but with Arnold at #13 rather than Farrell.
This is a scheme that we’ve used a bit this season. The edge carrier – the anchor in this move – has two key roles once Murray finds him with a long range pass.
He has to first commit the edge defenders to move in a straight line on his position without drifting and then he has to work beyond the gainline to chop Ulster’s drift by blocking their defenders coming across the pitch.
For the first job, he passes a little early for me, but Marshall is confident that McCloskey has this on the inside if Arnold chooses to carry and slips off the line quite quickly onto our second layer runners.
Arnold can still make an impact by chopping out the drifting defenders on the inside, so that Carbery can attack the space between whoever Marshall takes on the slip and the inside defenders coming across – McCloskey.
We don’t quite get the impact we need beyond the gainline here but it’s a big ask for a 95kg centre like Arnold to bump a 111kg man like McCloskey off his drift. The opportunity is still there for the break after the pullback – a break from Carbery with a possible offload to Conway – but we’re dealing with a slightly smaller gap with a shorter window to create the linebreak.
After we hit the deck on this break, we need to make an impact on the next few phases to stack another few gainline wins on this first phase strike.
We get a small gain off Botha’s carry and a decent recycle but we hit a brick wall on the phase after it. Wycherley and Conway get a good clear away on McCloskey and Herring after the contact but our next carry can’t take advantage of this.
Niall Scannell gets stopped by Henderson, and we then go onto lose four players to the ruck while Ulster only lose one.
We get gainline, yes, but we badly lose players to the contact point and cough up slow ball on top of it. Ulster have all the time in the world to get set for the next phase.
We’re looking for a surge from the second layer. Once this ball comes back from O’Donoghue to Rory Scannell, if we choose not to hit O’Mahony at the point where it’s most effective to pass to him, we have to hit the Ulster edge hard and direct. Beating Burns is a must but relatively straight forward. Driving through Rea on the cover is the key.
We give up a lot of lateral space and lose way too many players supporting Scannell’s carry. Rea wins the collision and drives towards the touchline. We lose attacking space and four forwards to the supporting breakdown.
They aren’t committed to the breakdown and hop back into the line for the next phase but they don’t affect the next phase positively. By losing the collision, we made the next phase way easier to defend for Ulster.
Ulster have us well covered on this last phase and a forward pass to Earls coughs up possession. Even if we don’t hit that forward pass, Ulster are in a real position of strength from a numbers perspective.
That’s good man for man coverage in the primary line with Burns covering the inside break in the second layer. Ulster need to make a mistake for us to break the line here and, in the end, we make the mistake.
That inability to stick defenders with the threat of our wider carrying was a constant during the game to varying levels. We had the same issue as above on this instance but mixing up the scheme gave Daly a chance to make good gain line.
The presence of Earls holds Marshall here and Daly takes advantage of that window by getting right over the gainline.
After a few setup phases, we finally get a breaking opportunity.
Coombes pullback compresses Ulster’s line and sets us off around the corner. If the pass from Scannell to Goggin is cleaner, we’ve got a 4-1 isolation on the edge with workable space in the backfield.
