Munster’s game against Glasgow last Friday night was significant – and not because it’s the last rugby Munster rugby that we’ll get to see for the next few weeks.
Munster’s defensive performance in a blustery, icy cold Musgrave Park marked a real turnaround in our structure, alignment and individual decision making when compared to our last outing against Glasgow in Scotstoun earlier this season. It was also a great step for JP Ferreira as he grows into his role as Munster’s defensive coach. For me, rugby defence depends on a lot of creativity and intelligence to be successful. This performance against a Dave Rennie coached Glasgow side is a good indicator of Ferreira’s thought process and I thought we handled Glasgow’s unique play style really well, bar two or three errors.
To fully understand Munster’s defence in this game, we need to look at what Glasgow like to do, what they do well and, crucially, where they like to do it.
Three Phases Of Action
I’d hesitate to use “always” when describing what a team is likely to do in certain areas of the pitch because it’s rarely as cut and dried as that so I’ll use “tend to” in this instance for clarity’s sake. In general, Glasgow have a different way of playing depending on where they are on the pitch.
Keep in mind that there’s a healthy area of overlap on these areas.Action Area 1
Glasgow’s work in their own 22 in a little different than most sides in the PRO14 in that they tend not to exit from places that most other teams would. Glasgow will often look to put wide hands on all kinds of ball in their own 22 as they look to attack teams who “switch off” when they think a clearing kick is on the way. Ideally, they’ll look to get the ball to the trams as quick as possible to launch three or four interlinking runners into space for massive linebreaks and/or tries. We were caught by this very move in Scotstoun, as were Exeter, and the only way to remedy it is to keep a flat, wide blitz on at all times.
Glasgow didn’t really use this style of play in their own 22 all that much against Munster – the conditions saw to that – but they did try to use an element of this once or twice.
Munster handled this quite well. They’re aided by some poor running lines and passing from the Glasgow backs but they followed the general rules that apply to Glasgow all over the field – they will mostly only pass the ball through two pairs of hands if it’s backs who are on the ball. We just kept the blitz going here and pressured the passing lanes between Hasting and the forwards outside him.
Defending Glasgow in this area of the field is generally an attention game. If you aren’t switched on, they’ll punish you.
Action Area 3 (or post quick ball phase work)
Glasgow’s work in the opponents 22 is quite similar to some of the work that the likes of Leinster and Scarlets like to do, in the way it uses forward hands and pull back passes to stretch defensive lines and give playmakers space to make something happen. They’ll also go to this style after they’ve made a significant linebreak all over the field and have a broken defensive alignment to work with.
In this instance, once you’ve given up the linebreak, you have to back your ability to scramble and we did that quite well in the above instance. This is also the only Action Area where you’ll see multiple Glasgow forwards in wide pods.
Action Area 2
This is where Glasgow take the most amount of stopping and the way the align in this area of the pitch is quite interesting in that it takes a structural weakness in Glasgow’s forwards – a lack of dominant ball carriers – and negates it almost completely.
They do this by compacting their forwards in a tight group (sometimes leaving one forward on the far side of the pitch) and playing almost exclusively off #9 to retain possession and generate quick ball, which they have become incredibly proficient in working with in wide alignments.
They’ll hit a ball carrier in the middle of two support players, and have him run a tight line into the defence with a clean out pod ready to generate lightning quick ball.
Let’s have a look at a classic Glasgow attacking alignment;
I wrote this in the Red Eye last week if you want some illustration as to how Glasgow use this alignment to crab across the pitch until they get the perfect combination of quick ball, superior numbers, a fringe break or a centre field ruck.
The key for Munster was how we denied them all four of those conditions for much of the game. We did this by keeping good north/south separation from the ruck, making strong one on one tackles, hitting extremely well on the midfield blitz and attacking Glasgow’s key wide-alignment rucks through Chris Cloete and Robin Copeland.
Munster initially combatted Glasgow by the way we structured our defence to match Glasgow’s narrow forward alignment.
This gave Munster a solid base to track Glasgow around the pitch in their forward sets. Watch Munster’s forwards on this sequence;
No more than two men commit to the tackle and there’s a high premium placed on “floating” behind the ruck to make sure that there is always heavy protection in that channel 1 area. The key here is in making sure that we make dominant tackles man on man and avoid attacking the breakdown until the time is right.
The spacing behind the ruck is interesting and it’s something I’ve been asked about a fair bit since last Friday.
We kept that spacing from the ruck to prevent Glasgow from going around the fringes. This is something that they like to do through their forwards in positions just like above, and regularly through their small, nippy scrumhalves. This spacing makes sure Munster can step into a strong tackle, rather than having to make a weak “stepping across” arm tackle.
That space also allowed us to make sure our “channel 1” area was well manned.
If you stack the channel 1 area against Glasgow and prevent them from steamrolling you, you can make their attack look a little panicky and hurried. Essentially, they spread the ball to their backs too early and get blitzed into next week. I’ll show you.
First, here’s what I mean by “channel 1”;
Munster have a strong channel 1 defence set on this phase. Have a look at how Kleyn and Dave O’Callaghan stopped this channel 1 carry;
That’s strong, and it was a loss of ground and numbers for Glasgow (five Glasgow on two Munster). That forced them to panic and go wide without their usual set-up;
Sam Arnold gets a beaut of a hit on their #12 and Goggin helps Copeland get the penalty over the ball. Kleyn and O’Callaghan’s stop in channel 1 made it easier to defend the outside channel because we had a numerical advantage.
Stopping The Ideal
Ideally, Glasgow want to run through a few short phases, expose your outside edge in space and then spring an attack through the backs. They’ll go short > short > short quick ball/numbers > spring to the backs when the alignment is right.
Here’s a good example;
How did this happen? We had Kleyn on the outside edge of the line with Arnold. That kind of space is perfect for Glasgow to attack with a flat pass before contact, and they struck with real precision here and scored a massive linebreak that they should scored from.
Arnold over blitzed on Fagerson, and that leaves a little too much for Kleyn to do on the edge but for me, the trouble happened at the previous ruck. Cloete made a decent enough stop considering it was 3-1 but when we lost Copeland from the line, it gave Glasgow a crack in the line to work with.
Copeland breaks the system by making a go for the ball when the ruck is already won. We need him in the defensive line here so we can spread to cover the only option for Glasgow given they’d burned all their forward pods on this play – the wide pass to the backs.
If we’d had that extra man in the line close to the ruck, this break doesn’t happen without someone missing a tackle. Have a look;
I can’t be too harsh on Copeland, as we did have a good return in attacking those last set up rucks with a strong jackal, but he didn’t really have a shot at stealing this one. It’s a nitpick, but it’ll be little things like this that Munster will be focusing on.
You could tell that Munster put an awful lot of thought into how they were going to defend Glasgow, and their success in keeping them to one try (off an injured player).
