You won’t beat any of the South African sides in South Africa unless you have your offensive breakdown in order. Win collisions, win your set piece battle, win the breakdown – that’s how it works if you want to win. If any of those are off, you lose.
Last time out, we did not have our breakdown in order and were duly walloped.
Suppose we repeated the same trick against the Stormers. In that case, we’d get the same pumping but with the added distress of it throwing our season into critical jeopardy when it comes to earning Champions Cup qualification. Do you really want to be looking at Scarlets and Glasgow in the Challenge Cup fretting over losing out on the Champions Cup? Me neither.
So, with that in mind, and armed with a very recent example of our breakdown work costing us a game, we knew exactly what we had to do against the Stormers and, indeed, in general.
The best breakdown performance by Munster this season came against the Vodacom Bulls in Thomond Park where we racked up a combined ORW score of 523 on 1.4 PPC. To make our system work at full capacity I think we need to consistently hit the mid-450s. When we go below 430, we can look ropey, when we go below 400 into the 300s we always lose.
With that in mind, how did we do here?
MUNSTER’S OFFENSIVE RUCK WORK SCORE VS STORMERS
- A Dominant Clean is an action that decisively secures possession when the ball carrier takes contact. A Dominant Clean does not have to be the first arrival at the breakdown but it is rewarded in the context of effectiveness. We will assign this action 3 points.
- A Guard Action is where a player plays a role in helping to retain possession after we have “re-won” the ball on the floor. Sometimes this can happen on a carry/ruck point where there is no active contention by the opposition. Let’s assign this action 2 points.
- An Attendance can be anything from standing as a “kick shield” on a ruck to adding a bit of bulk to ward against a counter-ruck. I’m marking this down as being worth 1 point.
- An Ineffective Action is a blown cleanout, a lean, a breakdown penalty or an action that I couldn’t see any direct benefit for. This will be worth -1 point
Combined ORW Score: 393 points
First things first – didn’t I say earlier that anything under 400 points means we lose and anything in the 450 range means we win? I did. We scored 393 here. When we look at the possession share against the Stormers and compare that to the Sharks game, what do we get?
We played a tonne of off-ball rugby in the Stormers game so if we adjust the Combined ORW to account for our usual possession share – around 54% – we get an ORW score of… 451.
When you break down our ORW score per quarter, you can see the massive improvements from the Sharks game, particularly when it comes to the opening two quarters.
Top Five ORW Scorers
- Gavin Coombes – 50 points
- Stephen Archer – 44 points
- Jeremy Loughman/Diarmuid Barron – 31 points
- RG Snyman/Jack O’Donoghue – 26 points
- Jean Kleyn/Fineen Wycherley – 25 points
This game was a little weird in that we seem to have fully moved Coombes into a half-lock-style role build as our locks have upped their carrying. Coombes was the top ORW scorer last week too and he showed excellent variety and coverage here to lock down our possession.
Archer and the rest of the front row also showed up really well which allowed our locks to impose themselves on-ball when we had possession.
O’Mahony’s numbers are much lower than I had assumed they would be but his defensive breakdown output plus his carrying and lineout on both sides of the throw took up most of his calories. I’d expect a little different this weekend against the Sharks as we’ll need all the impact we can get to keep them from stuffing our possession.
