I haven’t been the biggest fan of Munster’s mauling for most of this season. It has felt, at times, like we lack the punch that top teams have when it comes to converting from close-range lineouts.

Go back to December and January and you’ll see a lot of our maul drives getting splayed and stopped by everyone from Glasgow to Bayonne to Leinster and Northampton. Connacht, even. It was a bad time.

But, to be fair, a lot of those times were done without key personnel in place. Mauling, like everything else in this game, is about Jimmys & Joes as much as it is about Xs & Os. You have to be well coached at the set piece but size and power matter just as much and if you don’t have it, you’re on a hiding to nothing against any serious team. Do you have the guys who help you overpower opponents or not? We didn’t, so we couldn’t. All the tricks and movements in the world don’t matter if, when it comes to it, you’re giving up too much size.

One of the hallmarks of our lineout work at the time was the dreaded “two-man cut out feint” scheme that always seemed to end up flying over the head of the tail jumper. This was a reaction to the fact that we didn’t have enough height or size on the pitch to deal with the opposition’s counter-launch. We added complexity to make their counter-launch more difficult; essentially, if we were employing a lot of movement, like a shell game, they would be under pressure to move their counter-jumpers around to follow us or pick the wrong slot to jump in, giving us a free take.

Sometimes we were just beaten up physically, like here where Bayonne put up a counter-jumper and still managed to stuff us clean with -1 metres made on the maul.

That is grim.

But you can see the power differential when we tried to go at our primary maul concept – the slice and roll.

As I said then, the key players in this sequence are Coombes as the front lifter and John Ryan as the back lifter, who we need to create a “power line” to drive through.

To make this work, Coombes has to slice “in” to the Bayonne counter-shove, while Ryan has to hold the infield side against their counter-shove. John Ryan – and Fineen Wycherley bracing him – can’t stop the defender from swimming through so the maul gets killed stone-dead on arrival.

The slice and roll is a technique used to duplicate the power of that obstruction penalty everyone was giving away there for a few months into a legal strategy. You do it by having one of your lifters – front is easier, but you can do it at the back if you have the size for it – “slicing” diagonally into the opposition maul defence, while the opposite lifter matches the rotation.

It’s important for both “bracers” in this case #1 on #8 and #4 on #3 to keep strong binds here so that the opposition can’t just slice through them and get onto the ball. This is what killed the maul against Bayonne. When it works, though, you get a power line of players that can isolate one or two defenders in a straight line – that the opposition can do nothing to stop – while the other side of the maul “rolls” around that line to drive through.

If the front lifter slices infield, the maul will roll towards the touchline side, if the back lifter slices towards the touchline, the maul will usually roll infield.

It’s the perfect “big” maul set-up and I think it was probably designed to have guys like Snyman, Kleyn or Edogbo heavily involved at key stages to make it work.

Now, what do you notice about this maul against the Lions?

Snyman slices in from the back on the drop, and Archer braces inside lift for long enough to ensure we get that line of players isolating one or two Lions defenders.

Once we have that go forward off the “slice”, the “roll” can come around and drive through the Lions who are already skittering backward. Look at the tight bind by Kendellen as the roll comes through.

Once the slice is effective – very few guys in this game bigger or more effective than a 130kg RG Snyman barging into that space – and the other side is protected, Munster’s roll can swing around and dominate a scattered opponent.

The bonus point try was scored under the same principles and using the same roles. Ahern in the six role, being lifted at the front by the tighthead with Snyman as the back lifter. Look for the slice and roll.

This one was even more effective – and scored from 10ms out! – because Jager kept a perfect bind on the front of the lift we had even more power to bully the isolated Lions at the front of the slice.

That was the bonus point and a seriously heavy Lions side put away in an area of the game they put a big value on.

That’s impressive work and impressive coaching by Andi Kyriacou. It bodes well for the rest of the season.