I love playing video games.
Well, I used to love playing video games, before the arrival of my lovely daughter. I don’t play video games anymore because I’m too busy singing Old McDonald from one of the three (!) Old McDonald picture books in our front room while Leni claps and grins maniacally whenever we get to the cow (moo!) and the goose (honk!). If you’re ever wondering what I’m doing between podcasts and articles, it’s this; singing Old McDonald to my little girl, who never, ever tires of it. Ever.
E-I-E-I-O.
But before that, I used to love playing Stellaris in my free time, such as it was. Stellaris is a real-time strategy game that scratched the itch I had from my teens when I used to play Civilisation, Civ 2, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri and Command & Conquer. Fun fact – I used Hell March from Command & Conquer as the intro to Blood & Thunder for a bit before I discovered a badass song that was actually called Blood & Thunder.
In those games – and Stellaris in particular – there would always be a time when you got roughed up by the AI and had to rebuild. How you used those in-game years after getting busted up would determine how you progressed. Are you on the come-up or are you heading towards inevitable failure?
The current block of four league games between now and the end of March will determine the strength and quality of our come-up, or the taste of the bile that comes with inevitable failure. Twenty match points are on offer against very beatable opponents and, if we can take the points on offer, we could find ourselves back in the top two of the URC by the time we start loading up for Europe. After this bonus point win, we find ourselves in 9th on 29 points but, with 15 points over the next three games, that would put us on 44 points – which would have been enough for third after Round 13 last season and is tracking to be the same this year* given how many of our rivals play each other.
* As a quick aside, we’re currently three points behind our points tally after 12 games last season with only 10 games played.
So, all in all, this was a really good start to this block even if it was painfully rusty at times. We saw this last season too. Whenever Munster were away from the grind of games week to week, the on-ball understanding that we rely on as a point of difference can degrade quite quickly.
Small things – like a pass not going to the right target, a small line running issue – hurt Munster quite a bit because of how much ball we play in our 3-3-X shape. You can see the intent, which is great to see, but the execution wasn’t what it needed to be.
We saw the inverse of this theory, by the way, in the run-in last season where a fully fit Munster playing back-to-back-to-back seven weeks in a row won a trophy while winning in Glasgow, Dublin and Cape Town. Games are good for this team but, at the same time, after a bruising run in the previous 13-game block from an injury perspective, the 27 days without a fully competitive fixture was badly needed just to get guys that might have been running close to burning out back on an even keel.
That ring rust didn’t stick around for too long though, thankfully.
Unlike the hellmonths of December and January, Munster’s handling, power in contact and accuracy increased as the game went on, even in worsening conditions. That’s because, relatively speaking, Scarlets’ bench had no impact at all – understandable, given how deep they had to go into their squad – while ours actively drove us on at key points. Fineen Wycherley added similar levels of pop in contact that RG Snyman did so we didn’t want for guys to set a platform.
And, when it came to it, we had the accuracy to take the opportunities our system was creating from long range.
That’s the thing with what Munster are trying to do this season – we want to be able to hurt teams from further out than they can hurt us. In some ways, we’re better at converting opportunities from 35m out than we are from 5m – which is a problem but it’s also one that should be fixable as we progress this season.
What this game showed is that while we were quite janky for large periods, our base attacking structure can’t help but produce opportunities when we have collision winners in the middle of the field. RG Snyman had a decent first game back after a long layoff but even without hitting the lights out, he produced compressions for us after two or three passes that no defence can live with.
Stylistically, we hit all of our markers. Our Kick-per-Pass ratio was solidly in the heavy on-ball range – one kick for every 12.5 passes – with a Pass-per-Carry ratio of 1.37. We had too many turnovers – 17 in total – and if that was 12 or below, I think we put 60 or 70 on the Scarlets here but it’s a good indicator of what we need to fix.
The Scarlets are in such a bad place at the moment that their problems in-game can mostly be predicted in advance. I wrote before the game about
Needless to say, there are a tonne of opportunities for deep intercepts, long kick-throughs on dropped balls and turnovers in their second and third layer of attack on phase 4/5.
This happened constantly throughout the game where Munster ate up ground on the Scarlets’ possession as they tried to play around Munster’s linespeed. Munster knew all about their depth and let them kill their own territory one bite at a time. When you also consider how dominant our scrum was, there was no way into this game for the Scarlets and, besides a wobbly period in the third quarter for around 10 minutes, we never looked like doing anything else except leaving with a fiver.
All in all, five handy match points, some more good vibes in the tank and Zebre at home next with spring in the air and hard ground on the horizon.
Time for the come-up.
| Player | Rating |
|---|---|
| Jeremy Loughman | ★★★★ |
| Niall Scannell | ★★★★ |
| Oli Jager | ★★★★ |
| Tom Ahern | ★★★★ |
| RG Snyman | ★★★ |
| Ruadhan Quinn | ★★★ |
| Alex Kendellen | ★★★★ |
| Gavin Coombes | ★★★★★ |
| Conor Murray | ★★★ |
| Joey Carbery | ★★★★★ |
| Shane Daly | ★★★ |
| Alex Nankivell | ★★★★ |
| Antoine Frisch | ★★ |
| Sean O'Brien | ★★★★ |
| Mike Haley | ★★★★ |
| Eoghan Clarke | ★★★ |
| Josh Wycherley | ★★★ |
| John Ryan | ★★★ |
| Fineen Wycherley | ★★★★ |
| Jack O'Sullivan | ★★★ |
| Ethan Coughlan | ★★★ |
| Rory Scannell | ★★★ |
| Shay McCarthy | ★★★ |
