No team has a truly elite defence until they have an elite defensive maul.

Your maul technique is hugely important, as it is with all things in this game, but it’s not enough on its own at the very highest levels. You’ve got to have size and you’ve got to have power. Without those, you can be overpowered and bullied regardless of your technique because physics always wins in the end.  If you can combine all three qualities, you’ll have a defensive maul that denies the opposition forward momentum and actually forces them to play “numbers down” on the next sequence of play if your dominance is rewarded by the referee.

Munster have been a consistently excellent defensive maul side over the last few seasons. It’s one of our best qualities, in my opinion, and it was on full display for most of the game against Wasps at the weekend when we repelled multiple 5m drives right before the halftime whistle.

The manner of Munster’s maul defence was really interesting. I’ve mentioned Munster’s maul defence before – in particular, Jack O’Donoghue’s propensity for being a serial killer of mauls – and a lot of the qualities that make Jack such an effective maul killer are now present in the rest of the pack too.

Jack O’Donoghue’s “thorn” position – where he embeds himself in the maul and goes deeper into its structure as it moves forward around him – hinges on the interpretation of two specific maul laws;

• 16.7.c – Players joining a maul must have their heads and shoulders no lower than their hips

And, to an extent;

• 16.9 – All [other] players in a maul must endeavour to stay on their feet.

O’Donoghue specialised in walking the line between these two laws to drive himself through the middle of an offensive maul and appear right on the ball carrier, as if by magic.

That low body position is incredibly difficult to defend against while you’re also trying to move forward. Remember, from a defensive perspective, we want to produce one of the following law applications.

16.17: A maul ends unsuccessfully when:

• The ball becomes unplayable.
• The maul collapses (not as a result of foul play).
• The maul does not move towards a goal line for longer than five seconds and the ball does not emerge.
• The ball carrier goes to ground and the ball is not immediately available.
• The ball is available to be played, the referee has called “use it” and it has not been played within five seconds of the call.

That last one is the easiest one, in theory, to produce with any regularity but it relies on a referee’s interpretation of “first stop” and “use it” in line with your energy output. You work hard for that first stop, after the first stop you increase the pressure and when the referee calls “use it” that’s usually the defence’s cue to reduce your shoving output and prepare to transition to close range defence or wider defence in line with the attack’s action. Remember, when the referee calls “use it and it has not been played within five seconds of the call” it is supposed to be called as a turnover.

You can see how a sloppy application of “use it”, where the offensive team aren’t penalised for not using the ball within five seconds leads to late shoving gains. As Munster internally count down from the referee’s first “use it” and then “use” the pressure dips off and Wasps are unlucky not to score. When mauls are refereed like this, it’s incredibly difficult to get truly effective maul stops unless you get a more difficult “maul kill” where you get a defender onto the ball carrier to produce a “ball unplayable” or “ball carrier goes to ground and the ball isn’t immediately available” turnover.

But look at the build-up to those “use it” moments – how is it that Munster were able to completely nullify Wasps maul? Look at the height and look at the body positions on contact. Look at Munster’s height relative to Wasps height.

In any pushing contest, the team that is lower, fully locked out and longer will have a distinct advantage over the side that is higher and actively trying to move the ball forward.

If the above screengrab looks quite like Munster are scrummaging, that isn’t a coincidence. I’ve often spoken about mauling as a kind of “free-form” scrummaging and when you approach maul defence with the same general principles that you bring to the scrum, you get good results. I’m talking about being bound to each other, I’m talking about getting low and long, and I’m talking about getting a strong “brace” with your legs.

Look at that screengrab again and pay attention to how “long” the Munster pack are as they brace against Wasps shove.

That strong lock-out by Munster when combined with their low height allows us to win this engagement 5 on 8 – we have three forwards to guard the touchline flank and the inside lane. Archer joins the maul soon after, leaving Loughman and Barron to track the maul as it moves. Loughman will engage if the maul crabs infield or there’s a “burst” on his side and Barron will engage if it crabs towards the touchline on the same terms.

That low platform and “scrum” like bind and entry is a very powerful tool for countering and stopping opposition momentum dead – especially early in the shove. When we apply these principles to the rest of the mauls in this close range sequence, we can see why it’s such an effective counteraction to almost any maul drive.

It’s energy-efficient and it makes the most of guys with top-end size like Kleyn and Coombes while maximising the impact of maul specialists like Beirne, O’Donoghue, O’Mahony and Archer.