In last off-season’s Big Reset series, I hypothesised ways that Clayton McMillan would look to reboot and retool Munster from what we were, to that point, into something different.

Very little of that actually transpired, either in form or effect.

Was the inertia from the previous seasons too strong, with the same player base and unit coaches? Yes. Did I overestimate how Chiefs-like Munster should, would or could become under McMillan in his first season? Yes. Did a few badly timed injuries in the areas we didn’t have adequate depth disrupt core parts of what we would have done, in an ideal world? Definitely.

But that aside, Munster didn’t look all that different from last season, and dramatically worse than that at times. We finished fifth in the URC, lost three from four in the pools in Europe, exited the Challenge Cup at the Round of 16 stage, and the URC knockouts at the quarter-final stage. I think, broadly, we got what we deserved.

So let’s have a look at why.

First, let’s get to the stats from our URC season in 2025/26.

There are some interesting bits in there, and I’ll get to those. The first one that stood out to me was Munster being #1 in turnovers won, and third in tackle volume. Immediately, that puts me thinking about a team that might be suitable for a more off-ball, kick pressure and transition style game, but we didn’t really play that way for most of the season. Was this a form of tactical incoherence?

Maybe, but trends across the league don’t support that.

In the URC last season, there was no direct correlation between teams that kicked a lot, defended a lot and won a lot of turnovers, bar one — Cardiff.

The correlations for everyone else are, essentially, flat. Tackles made versus kicks from hand actually comes out slightly negative (r = −0.12), and turnovers won versus kicks from hand is only weakly positive (r = +0.19) — nowhere near strong enough to call a relationship.

Kicking metres tells the same story (r = +0.03 against tackles, +0.16 against turnovers). With 16 data points, anything in that ±0.2 range is statistical fart noise; you’d want to see roughly 0.5 or higher before claiming defensive workload predicts kicking.

What is interesting is that if you isolate the six teams that were above the league average on both tackles made and turnovers won — the “defend a lot, win a lot of ball back” profile — five of the six actually kicked less than the league average, not more:

• Ulster: 373 kicks, 77 below average
• Ospreys: 392, 58 below
• Munster: 437, 13 below
• Edinburgh: 438, 12 below
• Connacht: 440, 10 below
• Cardiff: 572, 122 above

So Cardiff are the lone team fitting that particular tactical hypothesis, and they are dragging the correlation upward almost single-handedly. Strip Cardiff out, and the high-defence cluster is unambiguously a below-average-kicking group across the season. Again, interestingly, Cardiff were the only team in that group to broadly over-perform based on pre-season expectations across the full campaign, even allowing for Connacht’s excellent 2026 off the back of a rotten start to the season.

Just looking at league trends, the heaviest kickers in the league were mostly the opposite type — Cardiff aside, it’s the Lions, Scarlets, Stormers and Leinster, sides that don’t dominate the tackle or turnover counts.

Munster’s defensive outlier stats here seem to be just that — an outlier. Something we did well in a season when we didn’t do much of anything consistently well. I suppose the purpose of looking at these stats at all — and the games themselves from week 1 until the quarter-final exit — was an attempt to find our on-field identity. We didn’t really have one.

Everything is very muddled.

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If you want to see what a coherent identity looks like in numbers, we should start with the team that topped the table. Glasgow Warriors were the league’s purest expression of a single idea: keep the ball, run it, and back yourselves to score tries rather than kick at the posts. They gained more metres than any side in the URC (8,914) and beat more defenders than anyone by a distance (547, with the next-best team on 483) — not the most points, but unmistakably the most dangerous side in possession. They kicked among the least, sitting 13th for both kicks from hand and kicking metres, because their instinct was to hold the ball rather than trade it for territory in most instances.

And then there’s the single most revealing number in the entire dataset. Glasgow attempted just two penalty kicks at goal all season. Two. Every other side in the league took between five and forty-eight. It isn’t a weakness disguised — they converted at nearly 80% when they did pull the trigger — but a flat refusal of the three points in favour of the corner and the try. Leinster, tellingly, were the next most reluctant, and the two most ambitious attacking teams in the competition, both arriving at the same conclusion is no accident. Glasgow’s low tackle count and modest turnover numbers complete the picture tactically. You don’t defend much, or contest many breakdowns, when you have the ball as often as they did, and an 82% tackle success rate, second in the league, says they defended efficiently when they had to. A reliable set-piece (90% lineout, 91% scrum) gave the whole thing its platform.

Now, you could say that this approach was hugely attritional and, paired with a smaller squad than last season, it meant they exited Europe and the URC deep into the season, but the identity is there.

For the perfect inversion, look at the DHL Stormers. Where Glasgow refused the points, the Stormers chased them: they attempted 48 penalty goals, comfortably the most in the URC, and had a go at seven drop goals (landing none of them) — a side built on set-piece pressure, transition, and scoreboard patience.

They won more scrum penalties than anyone (62) off the back of the competition’s best lineout (92%), and turned that platform into points by the most pragmatic route available while matching it with immense ambition on transition. Two top-four teams, two opposite philosophies about how to win a rugby match. Like Glasgow, they finished the season disappointingly, but they have an identity to build around.

Cardiff are the third clear identity in the league, and the one most relevant to what I discussed earlier: the territory-and-pressure grinders. They kicked more than any team in the league (572), defended ferociously (second for tackles made, third for turnovers won), and offloaded almost least of all (79) — a low-width, low-frills side that finished sixth despite scoring modestly. They are, in effect, the model I spoke about above: win defensive collisions, menace the breakdown, kick for field position.

And the Vodacom Bulls round it out as the heavyweight. They scored the most points and the most tries in the league and owned the scrum (96%), but they also conceded more turnovers than any side in the competition (297) — a front-foot power team that played with risk baked in, and rode it all the way to the final.

What unites these four is that their statistics and their game plans point in the same direction.

That’s what makes them legible, and it’s exactly what’s missing from the muddier profiles in the URC this season, Munster’s chief amongst them.

Munster’s profile is the league’s most self-cancelling.

Almost every strength in our numbers has a weakness sitting directly beside it, undoing the advantage before it can compound, which is why a season of decent parts never added up to something more coherent and, as a result, more dangerous.

We were the best team in the league for winning turnovers, as I showed above, but we also lost the ball 255 times, the sixth-highest figure in the league. So the club that was best at prising the ball loose from the opposition was also among the worst at holding onto it ourselves. The breakdown battle that looks dominant in isolation is, on the net, close to a wash — we handed possession back almost as readily as we won it. When you add in 193 penalties conceded, mostly at the scrum and in defence, you have another catch-22. For every turnover we won, we handed a penalty back at almost the same rate.

The same pattern runs through the kicking game. When we did kick, we kicked well: our retention rate of 18.1% was fifth-best in the league, which is the fingerprint of a side that can contest in the air and get the ball back.

Yet we kicked below the league average in volume, 11th of 16. That’s a tool we were demonstrably good at, but we didn’t seem to use it enough. Pair that with the league-best turnover rate, and you have a team holding two of the three ingredients for the territory-and-transition model Cardiff rode to an over-performing season — the ability to win the ball back, and the ability to retain a contestable kick — but declined to build a game around either. The platform was there, but the plan to exploit it wasn’t.

Munster’s goal-kicking quietly drained a season of hard-won field position. Our 63% conversion rate ranked 14th of 16, well below the league’s 71% average — a shortfall worth roughly nine points across the campaign, and closer to thirty against elite standards. For a side that lived and died on fine margins across most of the season, those leaks proved costly.

And the set-piece, once a bedrock of the whole Munster identity, undercuts itself most painfully of all. The lineout holds up at 88%, sixth in the league. That’s fine, in isolation, but we were rarely able to use it for much more than transiting into long on-ball sequences.

There was functionally no maul threat off the back of that — Glasgow, Cardiff and the Bulls have the best outcomes there — but statistically, the lineout was just about OK across the season.

The scrum, however, won 89% of its own ball and conceded 60 scrum offences, the second-most in the entire competition. A platform that’s meant to win penalties and territory was instead giving them away.

The throughline is a team that generates raw materials better than its league position suggests — turnovers, defensive workload, a competent aerial game — but whose pieces refuse to lock together. Win the ball, then give it back. Kick well, but not enough. Earn the position, then miss the kick. A toothless lineout, and a scrum that was arguably the worst in the top half of the table.

No single number damns us; it’s the way each one is contradicted by the one beside it.

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Outside of the set piece — and maybe directly influenced by it — our attack was really poor this season.

It was a study in industry without enough reward, a unit that did a great deal of work to manufacture chances and then struggled to make that effort count on the scoreboard. The raw totals place us squarely in the league’s middle tier: 410 points and 61 tries, ninth of the sixteen URC sides in both. That is the output of a side that competes without ever properly threatening across a block of games, that scores enough to win the tight ones but never enough to pull away — and it sits a long way behind the league’s genuine attacking forces, the Bulls (611 points, 88 tries) and Leinster (574, 86) chief amongst them.

Both of those sides — Leinster and the Bulls — go about scoring in different ways, but they have core parts of their game to fall back on. The Bulls have their scrum, maul, killer pace and tight power. Leinster haven’t been great this season relative to their expectations, but when they get into the 22 against 95% of opponents, they convert more often than not.

Dig beneath Munster’s totals, and the ball-carrying numbers tell a mid-table story. Munster gained 6,510 metres, eleventh in the league, and beat 376 defenders, twelfth — both below the competition average and a world away from Glasgow, who topped those charts at 8,914 and 547 respectively. Our clean-break count of 119 was thirteenth, deep in the league’s bottom third. This was not a team that sliced opponents open or broke the gainline at will; it had to grind for its territory, carry by carry, rather than generate line breaks from open play.

The offloading game offers a small flicker of ambition: 129 offloads ranked seventh, the one attacking metric where Munster sat in the upper half. It hints at a side willing to keep the ball alive in contact, to play with some width and instinct when the chance arises. But it’s an isolated bright spot rather than the foundation of an identity, and it isn’t supported by the line-breaking and metre-making numbers that would turn offloads into genuine attacking momentum. That’s the problem, almost. Like last season and the one before it, we offloaded under pressure to keep a sequence going, rather than offloading for a kill-shot.

You can throw the ball out of the tackle all you like; if you aren’t beating defenders or breaking the line in the first place, those offloads rarely lead anywhere dangerous.

The deeper problem is what happened to the attacking work once it reached the scoring zone. A side that finishes ninth for tries and generates only mid-table metres and bottom-third clean breaks, is converting pressure into points at a respectable rate — the tries are there relative to the chances created — but the chances themselves are too few, and the goal-kicking that should have topped up the total leaked points at every opportunity.

The attack, in other words, wasn’t broken so much as capped. Limited. It was competent at finishing what little it built, but it rarely built enough across the full season.

Set against the team’s defensive and breakdown strengths, the picture is of a fundamental imbalance. Munster won more turnovers than anyone in the league and defended in huge volume, but had no attacking engine capable of punishing all that hard-won possession.

We had no issue winning back the ball, but we didn’t hurt the opposition enough with it. A ninth-placed attack built on grind rather than penetration is the clearest sign of a side that is some distance from the league’s elite. We were a possession team that was somehow better when we didn’t have possession.

To strip it right back, we looked like a team that wanted to be a bit of everything. A group that wanted to lean into being a possession team while turning the ball over more than most, and whose best feature was on the defensive side of the ball, which itself was undercut by massive penalty concessions and a scrum that only leaked fewer offences than the Dragons.

We were our own worst enemy this season, in more ways than one.

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That brings me back to the Big Reset. If I were to sum up Munster this season, the conclusions would be broadly the same as 2024/25, but harsher. We have a new head coach, but most things on-field stayed the same, if they didn’t get worse in some key areas.

There are reasons for that, though. The squad was functionally identical to the previous season, just older across the board, and just a little too old in the front five, for the most part. Our availability across the season was mostly excellent — until the last three games of the season, when it got as bad as the worst of the early Rowntree years — but the guys we missed for most of the season hurt us badly.

It was a season that, when you look at it through the lens of our statistical output, only enhances the idea of compromise. Of half measures. It makes bringing in a new head coach, but keeping all the existing coaching staff, including making a senior coach out of the attack lead of the previous few seasons, of slapping a ticket together and then being surprised that core parts contradicted themselves.

After watching the games back in the last few weeks, we never looked worse than when we were bedded into long possession sequences against a team that blitzed us on that flat 1-3-3-1 shape, with forwards losing collisions half a heartbeat after getting the ball, because that’s what the structure demanded of them. Our error rate wasn’t huge, relative to our carry rate, but we conceded way more tries off the back of a handling error than we should have because everything was so high-risk. We loved the concept of flat passes into lateral space, but that demanded the perfect catch, the perfect tip-on, the perfect screen ball and timed lines off it, and we weren’t perfect anywhere near enough.

This is a squad that needs a change in focus. More than that, it needs a visible, coherent identity to build around.

A side with a bottom-ranked scrum, no maul to speak of and a middling possession-based attacking game can’t compensate for an excellent turnover won metric. We’ve seen that clearly this season, so that has to change.

Getting a better scrum is an “easy” fix. More experienced coaching, plus Jack Aungier and Marnus Van Der Merwe, will improve it incrementally, far more than people expect. It’s an obvious weakness with a clear path to fixing it, which is better than a less obvious area of concern with a complex fix.

Our attacking game — and our general concept of what team we want to be in possession — is that more complex problem. We need better strike plays, that much is clear, but that is mainly a coaching fix as much as anything. You hire the guy you need there to get the outcome you hope for, but it’s our phase play, in particular, that needs to change.

What we choose to do with the ball when we have it.

I think what is far more clear is that the possession team we wanted to become after Van Graan’s departure, in the first two seasons of Rowntree and Prendergast, has run its course. The core of what made that team work has either moved on, aged out, or been stymied by opposition scouting. We have been too easy to defend against for the last two seasons, and that has to be addressed.

Are we going to double down on what we’ve been doing, but change aspects of it, like the forward shape, the general depth of our attack, core roles within it or how we choose to use possession in the first instance? I think we are far more skilled than the system we’ve generally employed all season suggests. For example, how much better would we look with an extra 5m of depth on our running lines? How much more pop in the contact would we have if our shape off #10, in particular, wasn’t a flat line of three forward runners?

This season, it felt like our core attacking play was to find Tom Farrell on a flat line at the edge of a play so he could make something happen with a square run or an offload. When that didn’t work — and it mostly didn’t — we were far more likely to bounce from 15m line to 15m line looking for either a forward to find a killer tip on or pullback, or for Jack Crowley to magic something up out of nowhere.

But there are more fundamental questions, too.

Are we a better kicking and chasing team with the personnel we have as it stands? If so, our lineout, maul, scrum and transition game have to be incrementally better than they are now.

This leads to the question of energy management.

Munster played a high-energy, low-relief style — among the most contact-heavy on both sides of the ball, and least kick-reliant in the league when you assess both together with our kicking output.

Two things burn you in the modern game: phase play (carries, mainly) and defence, with phase play burning more energy than defence on the whole. Kicking, in this instance, is a way to relieve this physical load.

When you plot this, you can see the issue pretty clearly.

This chart maps how each URC side spent its energy across the 2025/26 season.

The vertical axis is total collision workload — every carry plus every tackle a team made, the raw physical toll of a campaign. The horizontal axis is how much they kicked the ball from hand. Kicking matters here because it’s the one way to move the ball and shift the effort onto the opposition, without running into contact.

It’s the release valve. The dashed lines mark the league averages, and the shaded box in the top-left is the telling one: teams doing above-average collision work while kicking below-average amounts — high effort, little relief.

We sit firmly inside it.

We racked up the third-highest collision workload in the league, behind only Connacht and Glasgow, yet kicked just the 11th-most. In other words, we did close to the most physical work of any side and leaned least on the kicking game to ease it. Cardiff are the instructive contrast: almost exactly Munster’s workload, but the heaviest kicking game in the league pushes them far to the right — same engine, smarter energy management, and an above expectation finish, even allowing for Munster finishing ahead of them on points difference.

The bubbles size each team by turnovers conceded per 100 carries — ball security adjusted for how much a side carries, so the volume of carries doesn’t distort it. Munster’s bubble is mid-sized: our retention was roughly league-average, not the weakness the raw turnover count suggests.

The sharper point lives in the company we’re keeping in that quadrant. Connacht and Glasgow carry even more than Munster but have the two smallest bubbles on the chart — they hold the ball far more securely across that volume. Is it any shock that Connacht play a broadly deeper style in possession than we do? A less taxing shape produces better ball retention. Something to consider.

That’s what a sustainable high-workload style looks like, even allowing for Glasgow falling short of their expectations in Europe and the URC. Munster did the same punishing volume of work as both of them, with only ordinary ball retention. That ball retention metric is the key.

Even more than that, does that workload on both sides of the ball suggest a cause for the rash of injuries at the tail end of the season? Injuries happen, of course, but I’d be interested to see if the workload on both sides of the ball contributed more than it might seem on the face of it. It’s a long season, and a physical sport — but it seems to me that this inefficiency comes back to a visible lack of identity relative to what we have in the squad now, today, this season.

That’s the job that McMillan has in front of him this coming off-season. He has to take what we’ve learned this season and adjust the template accordingly.

So it’s not a big reset. It’s a hard one.