On paper, Munster’s halfback chart looks fairly solid but when you look a little bit closer, man, it starts to get really complex.

Go back to July and you’ll see Conor Murray and Joey Carbery involved heavily with Ireland as they toured – and beat – New Zealand. Go back a few months before that and you’ll see Conor Murray getting a new two-year central contract with the IRFU and Joey Carbery signing a two-year provincial deal that was and is a significant investment in a player that has fewer Munster caps than Ben Healy.

Murray and Carbery ended 2021/22 as Munster’s defacto starting half-back pairing. Will they end 2022/23 in the same position? We’ll have to wait and see. Their test status as the current backup pairing to Gibson-Park and Sexton would suggest they’ll take a bit of shifting but it’s a long season with a new attacking scheme to get a handle on so I’d also suggest that anything can happen.

The safest player in that pairing, for me, is Joey Carbery.

That two-year contract that Joey Carbery signed last season sees him enter the most important two-year spell of his career, in my opinion.

This is Joey Carbery’s fifth season as a Munster player, believe it or not, and by far the biggest issue in that time has been his availability due to injury. Without that series of injuries that limited him to an average of 9 games a season over his first four campaigns here, I think Joey Carbery would likely be pushing Johnny Sexton for the Irish #10 jersey right now, as opposed to being solidly cast in the backup role.

With Carbery, it hasn’t just been a case of being injured and then slotting right back where he was. If only. The biggest issue for Carbery as I see it since his return from, essentially, nearly 18 months out of the game in February of 2021 has been that he’s been struggling to make sync up the mind of 2019 pre-injury with the body as it is now.

That warm-up game against Italy in September 2019 is the key sliding door moment in Carbery’s career. When his ankle got trapped under an Italian drive close to the line, he probably should have been out of the World Cup there and then. Instead, he was brought along – no shock there, players play hurt all the time – because Ireland just didn’t have a backup to Sexton that was anywhere near Carbery’s level. He just didn’t look right in Japan. Looking back on it now, there were elements of the player we’ve seen since his eventual with Carbery’s core threats reduced by a lack of confidence in what his body could achieve.

He played for Munster against Ulster after the World Cup had finished but injured his wrist ligament in the process which was slated to keep him out for two to four months. In the midst of his rehab for that injury, Munster decided to send him for surgery on the injury sustained at the World Cup and his season was done. He came back for the 2020/21 preseason before being ruled out “indefinitely” in August 2020.

When Carbery came back in February 2021, he looked like a guy who was slowly trying to build his way back into “form”, if you want to call it that, but I think it was a far more fundamental process. To me, Carbery seemed to be trying to find out what type of flyhalf he was post-injury. At his peak pre-injury, Joey Carbery was electric. There’s no other word for it.

He could devastate defences with his step and acceleration from first receiver or in the wider channels. He could beat you on the outside. He could freeze you in space and cut you to shreds. He could then use the space that agility gave him – because you couldn’t get too close – to pick you apart with cross-field kicks or stabs through the middle.

Remember that assist for Sweetnam against Fiji? If you saw Romain Ntamack dropping an assist like that you’d think, yeah, that’s exactly what you’d expect from a World Class #10.

It’s genuinely undefendable, in my opinion. That is a player completely in sync with his body and “eye”. He sees the play he wants to make, his body reacts exactly how he wants and he’s away in a heartbeat.

See, react, execute.

In the aftermath of a serious ankle injury that, at one point, was set to keep him out indefinitely it can take a lot of time to get back to that See, React, Execute confidence. Sometimes that ankle is never what it was and you have to pair back elements of your game to compensate. Finding out what those elements are – essentially what you can and can’t do – takes time.

Carbery was feeling his way through his return in 2021. He was OK – decent to good at times – as Munster lost the hastily scheduled PRO14 final and missed out on the Rainbow Cup. He finished out the season well with two games against Japan and the USA for Ireland.

He played the most amount of games he’s managed since 2017/18 last season but ultimately, Joey just hasn’t played enough rugby over the last four years to work out who he is as a player properly in 2022.

Compare Carbery to Sexton since his return to Ireland in 2015.

These are Sexton’s games for Leinster and Ireland since he came back from Racing 92.

• 2015/16 – 26 games
• 2016/17 – 18 games
• 2017/18 – 22 games
• 2018/19 – 19 games
• 2019/20 – 17 games
• 2020/21 – 12 games
• 2021/22 – 20 games

Sexton has only played fewer than 15 games once in the last seven seasons. That consistent game time gives him all the in-game pictures and metrics he needs to keep his game sharp and current.

Carbery, on the other hand, has lost two entire seasons to injuries that have kept him off the field. Sure, there’s the exhausting grind of rehab during those two years but the biggest issue is literally not playing, which sounds obvious, but when you’re not playing week to week as a #10, your game degrades faster than it would for any other player.

You can see those lost two years here, which include Munster and Ireland games.

• 2018/19 – 21 games 
• 2019/20 – 6 games
• 2020/21 – 11 games
• 2021/22 – 22 games

At the start of last season, he still seemed to be feeling out what he was capable of after a full preseason – his first since 2018 – but, for me, Carbery struggled in the 3-2-X system we were running. In preparation for this article, I watched back the entirety of Munster’s 2021/22 to see if Joey Carbery’s 2.45 average star per game rating across his eleven Munster appearances was fair.

I think it was.

If we plot Carbery’s star ratings out you can see a slow start, a seasonal peak for the Wasps game before a two-month injury that kept him out of Munster until post-Six Nations, a dud game against Leinster and then a seasonal peak against Exeter before the air slowly left the tyres as the season closed out.

A slow start and a bad end of the season really dragged down his overall average from a score perspective and, I suppose a perception perspective. I do a lot of teamsheets, as you know, and the general reaction to Joey Carbery’s selection really seemed to dip as the season went on. That’s the very definition of anecdotal evidence, I know, but it’s something I noticed more and more. The same kind of security people feel with Sexton at Leinster and Ireland isn’t, currently replicated in Munster with Joey Carbery. Maybe that’s performances, maybe it’s the injuries, maybe it’s that we’ve spent most of the last three seasons without him; maybe it’s all of these things.

Isn’t this to be expected for a guy playing his first full season – even with an injury break midway through – since 2018/19? Yeah, I think it is.

As disappointing as Joey Carbery’s season was, ultimately, it was far from all his own doing. On my re-watch of the season, I slowly began formulating this hot take. I think we’d have looked better with Damian De Allende at #10 and Joey Carbery at #12 for the majority of our big games during 2021/22.

The 3-2-X system we were running needed our #10 to be an accurate short and mid-range passer who could win collisions on the gainline while our #12 needed to be a bit quicker, a bit more agile, a sharper mid-to-long range passer with a long, accurate boot.

I lost count of the number of times I saw Carbery confronted with a congested, heavy line of defenders (often with no inside loop option) where the only realistic option he had was to either take contact – where he’d lose the collision every time – or sling a pass to a two pod or a screen where the defence was crawling all over his passing targets.

Carbery was never the sharpest passer of the ball, in my opinion. He didn’t need to be. His pace and agility created larger windows for him to pass through and it suited him down to the ground. For me, the particular 3-2-X we were running seemed to demand that Carbery become a knockdown, sharpshooting mid to long-range passer just to get around the blitz. It didn’t suit him and it eventually lead to him drifting out of games because he had one of the best ball-carrying midfielders in the game outside him that he just couldn’t use most of the time.

Will the 3-3-1 we’ve been playing in preseason suit him? In theory, yes. A 3-3-1 system rewards an agile, pacey #10 who’s capable of stressing the lanes between defenders as the ball transits across him, who can cut the corner on the screen, who can get a variety of kicks away in close quarters and who can unhinge from the first receiver positon to impact, almost like a winger, in the wider channels while being a devasting threat on transition.

I mean, that’s literally Joey Carbery we’re talking about there, right?

That’s Peak Joey Carbery, certainly. Is the Joey Carbery of 2022 capable of playing that game? I think so, genuinely, but he’ll need time and minutes in that spot to really hammer down what he’s capable of. The biggest key for him is getting his confidence back – to remember what he’s capable of in this game. If he can, he’s a nailed-down Category 1 starter and rightly so.

On the flip side, we’re gone well beyond the point where we can look at Carbery as a young talent or about his potential, though. He’ll be 27 this November and 29 by the end of his current contract. At 27, Ronan O’Gara had two Heineken Cup final appearances in his back pocket and a Celtic League medal as THE guy for his team. At 27, Johnny Sexton had three Heineken Cup medals in his back pocket as THE guy for his team. At 27, Owen Farrell had four Premiership medals and two Heineken Cups as THE guy for his team.

He has two years of security on his provincial contract – rumoured to be a reduction on the hefty extension signed midway through his first season here – but this season is huge. Carbery has to show signs of being THE guy here in a way that is undeniable. That means big performances that aren’t just goal kicking with no two or three-game bedding in period, it means staying fit all season and landing as many games for Munster as he’s allowed, and it means making Munster look radically better with him than without him.

If he can’t, he’ll have his lunch eaten by Jack Crowley who looks suited to this new system down to the ground.

Last season showed how good Crowley can be and, in some games, the leaps he still has to make. I think, in some ways, Jack Crowley’s epic run with the Irish u20s in 2020 just before the pandemic set expectations quite high – almost unsustainably so – as to what was possible for a guy who was 19 at the time. Crowley was everything we were looking for right when Joey Carbery’s injury issues had really begun to sink in around the same period.

Crowley was athletic, confident, and shaping games to his will. Then the pandemic hit. Crowley joined the Munster academy in the “offseason” of 2020, such as it was given the season was over from March with no new beginning in sight until mid-to-late summer.

Crowley made his Munster debut while still a Year 1 academy player and signed a two-year deal that same season. He made his Champions Cup debut last season at 21, made his first start away to Castres aged 22 a month later and made 13 appearances across the season. He averaged 3.4 Stars per eligible appearance during the season with some really strong performances across the middle span of the season.

He played his last game of the season against the Lions on the 19th of March 2022 and had an absolute stinker right when it seemed like the then senior coaching staff was boiling down their team. Crowley missed the next game away to Benetton as part of the usual You Get A Start, Now You Bench, Now You Travel As A Reserve cycle that Munster used to do in three-man charts during the season. When Must Win April came around the corner, Carbery returned as a starter against Leinster but when Carbery missed the away game against Exeter in the R16 first leg, Healy was preferred to start with Rory Scannell as an unused bench replacement.

Jack Crowley is off contract this season and would seem to be an easy guy to re-up for another two or three-year deal from the club’s side. He’s the most highly rated young Irish #10 in the last few years, he’s already surpassed the other most highly rated Irish #10 – Harry Byrne – when it comes to actual important, live appearances in Europe, and he would seem to fit the profile of player we want here down to the ground. Crowley will need to see how the actual dice roll out under Rowntree before committing to anything, however, otherwise he’d have re-signed early last season.

From a practical perspective, Crowley is someone who can essentially role-twin Carbery so the new system we seem to be implementing has as little static as possible. That should translate into a lot of starts this upcoming season as we transition to that 3-3-1 system.

Ideally, if I’m Munster, I want Jack Crowley to sign a new three-year deal today that takes him two years beyond the end of Joey Carbery’s current deal. Why? I think we’ll have a good idea by the middle of 2022/23 if Carbery is going to be someone that we can actually build around going forward. If he’s not physically capable of activating the 3-3-1 it’ll be clear really early on so that allows us to transition to Crowley with contractual security from 2023/24 on. If Carbery’s minutes are managed from an Irish perspective, that will mean a lot of those minutes can get slotted straight into Jack Crowley in a system that seems to suit him perfectly. When we’ll be thinking about Carbery’s next contract – barring remarkable performances this season that might spur an early renewal with Leinster sniffing around post-Sexton – it’ll be in the general proximity of World Cup 2023, either slightly before or slightly after.

We’ll know NOW if signing Crowley up long-term makes sense so going heavy on his appearances in the early part of the season and getting him on a three-year deal makes a tonne of sense to me because it frees us from the questions over Joey Carbery, in one way. Crowley vs Carbery should be an active battle by the end of this season.

Where does that leave Ben Healy? Believe it or not, Ben Healy has the most Munster caps of all three senior flyhalves. That shouldn’t be a surprise. Since he broke out in 2020/21, Healy has racked up the appearances in the absence of Tyler Bleyendaal initially, then Joey Carbery, then alongside Joey Carbery as a replacement. Healy played 17 games in 2020/21 as a second-year academy player and then a massive 22 games last season.

On paper and in practice, Healy is the 1B out half to Joey Carbery’s 1A but, for some reason, he’s only signed one-year deals since he ascended out of the academy in the summer of 2021.

Why is that? It’s unusual for a guy with his usage season to season. He’s out of contract again in July 2023 and I think that puts him solidly in ASSESS 1 territory, as he was last season. I wrote the following about Ben Healy during the Depth Chart article ahead of 2021/22;

I think he’s a player with potential, for sure, but I need to see a development of his game this year to warrant a longer deal. I spoke about Healy in-depth on this Test Match Animal podcast but I’d like to see a development of his phase play and offensive output as well as pulling around his goal kicking, which degraded as the season progressed after an unreal start.

I think Healy is still in the same boat. Last season Ben’s average star rating per eligible appearance was 3.2. As with Carbery and Crowley, I went back and watched those games to see if I’d been unfair or overly emotional when awarding the ratings and, again, I think they were all pretty fair.

The biggest issue for Healy, in my opinion, was that he was… grand. Mostly solid. Ten of his eligible star rating appearances were ★★★☆☆ performances – both starting and off the bench – which reflects his overall average rating pretty well.

Did I see the offensive development I was looking for? Not really. Healy’s long-range skip pass off both sides is really good, for example. Look at the try he set up for Calvin Nash against the Scarlets last season – his one ★★★★★ performance of the season – and recognise the skill involved in landing this pass over two defenders.

Remember his 50/22 from that same game? Very few players have the length Healy does off the boot in situations like that and it’s just flat-out weird that we didn’t use him in that way more often. That Scarlets game was Healy’s highlight of the season. The rest of his games were pretty average. There’s nothing wrong with that – I mean, he’s got a better seasonal rating than Carbery – but I was constantly left wondering when Healy would start exerting himself on games. It never really came.

He seemed to double down on the long pass – and his passing in general – and seemed to play a lot smaller than he is. For a guy who’s 6’3″ and up around 100kg he doesn’t really challenge the gain line (offensively and defensively) as I’d expect. Healy should, in theory, be a close role match for Sexton but that doesn’t seem to be how it’s shaking out for him. It was especially true in the preseason friendlies just gone when I was waiting for Healy to straighten up the line and start imposing himself physically to help set the defence but it never came.

The same was mostly true last season. Healy played 926 minutes in 2021/22 and carried the ball 56 times. Jack Crowley played 457 – more than half Healy’s minutes – and carried the ball 44 times. Crowley carried the ball 12 times fewer, despite playing less than half Healy’s minutes.

That shows elements of both players’ approaches and what might and might not work in the 3-3-1 system going forward.

Healy doesn’t have to be a dynamic ball carrier to be a success at Munster – or in general – but if he doesn’t have that side to his game he needs to double down on other areas as a point of difference.

His goal-kicking is an obvious one.

Genuinely, I think if Ben Healy lands the two opportunities he had to beat Toulouse in the dying seconds of regular time and extra-time back in May we’re having a very different conversation but… he didn’t. Healy had the bollocks, the gumption and the fucking steel to step up and make those plays when it counted and fell short. There’s absolutely no shame in that.

He attempted to win the game at the death from 56m out and missed by a width of a ball. If he lands that, he’s an icon.

For me, though, I think Healy really needed those moments to hammer down on what he’s perceived to be good at. Healy broke onto the scene winning a game for Munster at the death from the car park against Scarlets. He backed it up a week later by kicking the heart out of Edinburgh off the tee in Thomond Park but since then, Healy’s been a good goalkicker but not really elite by any means.

He ran at 81% off the tee last season in the URC – enough to rank 9th in the competition – and 82% overall but I think for a guy like Healy, he’s got to pull that percentage closer to 86/87% while he’s getting his phase play game together. Ross Byrne was at 86%, for example, and has some of the same limitations to his game that Ben Healy does but he isn’t perceived the same way. A #10 doesn’t have to be a goal kicker to be a success or even an elite one, but if you have a guy who gives you 85%+ off the tee every season, that’s a hard guy not to build around even if they aren’t the full package elsewhere.

Ultimately, I can’t shake the feeling that Ben Healy’s 2021/22 created more questions than answers.

I think part of that is down to the system we were playing too. On paper, Healy was perfect for it – the exact physical profile you’d want – but without that tight collision-winning ability, he started shipping the ball on more and more as the season developed. It became so pronounced at times that he began slinging passes over the top of the blitz to try and shortcut his way through defences’ read of his game.

Sometimes it would work, more times it wouldn’t. In a new system that puts an emphasis on speed and breaking ability, can Healy adapt? I think he’s the best long-range passer in the squad, he’s the longest off the tee by some distance and can add real value in an elongated kicking game off his right or left. On the other side of the coin, however, he’s probably the least explosive of all the out halves in the squad, there are big questions about his defence at this stage and he’s been analysed by other clubs as “not having the pace” to impact them.

If Healy struggles – as he did in both halves of our preseason friendlies – I feel he could slip down the pecking order quite quickly, despite his experience to this point. For me, Healy has to add power to his game to make it work in this new system. He’s never going to be the transition threat that Crowley, Carbery or even Butler is but he can make a key point of difference by beefing up his ball carrying, defence and adding a few percentage points to his goal kicking. If he can do that, he’ll get capped for Ireland this year. If he can’t, he might not be at the province next preseason. That’s why I’ve listed him as ASSESS 1 for this season because I think the new system and the demands it appears to place on the halfbacks seem to be a bad fit for the Ben Healy I saw last season and so far in preseason.

Tony Butler, the year two academy flyhalf/fullback, should see some minutes this season during the URC. I was particularly interested to see him stepping in as a secondary playmaker at fullback during both preseason games. On the face of it, it would seem to suit a guy with Butler’s natural athleticism but who doesn’t seem to have the phase-for-phase tactical game at out half as of yet. As a playmaking fullback, he’d get to use all the same skills but with less overall playmaking responsibility. We’ll see how it plays out as the season progresses.

Priority 1: Important player to be replaced by the end of the season. 
Priority 2: Important player to be replaced within two seasons
Priority 3: Important player to be replaced within three seasons
Core 1: Important first-choice player with at least four seasons of peak performance remaining.
Squad 2: Squad player in peak age that likely has four+ seasons of high performance in a down-the-chart position.
Foundation Player: Young talent (20-24) expected to play for five + seasons and transition to Core 1.
Potential Foundation: Talent ID’d young player (18-23) that has the potential to ascend to regular first-team exposure as a Core 1 or Squad 2 type player.
Assess 1: A player that will need to be assessed for role suitability and depth chart position across the upcoming season with a view to their future usage or contract.

	Player Role	Age Jan 1 2023	Grade	Contract Year?
Joey Carbery	FLY HALF	27	CORE 1	NO
Jack Crowley	FLY HALF	22	POTENTIAL FOUNDATION	YES
Ben Healy	FLY HALF	23	ASSESS 1	YES
Tony Butler (A)	FLY HALF	20	ASSESS 1	YES

Part Two of the Halfbacks – scrumhalves – will be out on Monday, with the Outside Backs rounding off the Rebuilding The Big Red Machine series on Wednesday.