As Munster learned last week – and you might argue for most of this season – when you’re the champ, almost every game turns into a cup final. If you’re not where you need to be physically, emotionally and mentally, you’ll get caught out by your opponents, who see you as their game of the bloc especially at home.
When you’re at home, you’ve got to squash whoever comes to town and use every inch of home advantage to rack up the points that shoot you into the top four.
If you can pick up seven or eight home wins in this league with a few bonus points along the way with five, ideally six away wins with a few losing bonus points, you’re all but guaranteed a top-three finish.
Last season Munster won ten games in the URC regular season and six of those were at home. Losing three games at home in a URC season is… not good. We finished eight points off the top four – leading to the Hard Way Title, of course – but this season we want some home knockout gates in both competitions, ideally, as well as the slightly easier progression opportunities they give.
That means winning games like this one against another highly motivated opponent.
In fact, who could be more motivated than the team we beat in last year’s final?
Wouldn’t that grind your gears? Losing a home final? This is our new reality now. We’ve Leinster next who will want to answer for their defeat in last year’s semi-final and Glasgow, who we beat in the quarter-final, the week after that. It’s the Hard Way title run in reverse.
Long story short; if we’re not fully tuned in for this one then this Stormers team is 100% capable of mugging us repeatedly and winning this game, sending our early season promise into something of a spiral with Leinster and Glasgow to come. Even if we are fully tuned in, this will still likely be a very difficult game against an opposition that will almost certainly have been targeting this game on this tour as the one where they most want to make a statement.
Munster: 15. Shane Daly, 14. Calvin Nash, 13. Antoine Frisch, 12. Alex Nankivell, 11. Shay McCarthy; 10. Jack Crowley, 9. Craig Casey; 1. Jeremy Loughman, 2. Scott Buckley, 3. John Ryan, 4. Edwin Edogbo, 5. Tadhg Beirne, 6. Peter O’Mahony (c), 7. John Hodnett, 8. Gavin Coombes
Replacements: 16. Chris Moore, 17. Josh Wycherley, 18. Stephen Archer, 19. Thomas Ahern, 20. Jack O’Donoghue, 21. Conor Murray, 22. Rory Scannell, 23. Alex Kendellen
Stormers: 15. Warrick Gelant, 14. Ben Loader, 13. Ruhan Nel, 12. Sasha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, 11. Leolin Zas; 10. Jean Luc du Plessis, 9. Paul de Wet; 1. Sti Sithole, 2. Joseph Dweba, 3. Neethling Fouche (c), 4. Ruben van Heerden, 5. Gary Porter, 6. Willie Engelbrecht, 7. Ben Jason Dixon, 8. Evan Roos.
Replacements: 16. Andre Hugo Venter, 17. Ali Vermaak, 18. Brok Harris, 19. Adré Smith, 20. Keke Morabe, 21. Herschel Jantjies, 22. Clayton Blommetjies, 23. Angelo Davids.
Our performance here lives and dies at the breakdown.
Boring, right? But it’s true. Last week against Ulster, our on-ball patterns were cluttered by messy rucks which, in turn, led to an uneven off-side line which, in turn, led to under-pressure passing, less time and less space. The same thing happened against Benetton in Treviso for adjacent reasons – heavy breakdown pressure + a heavy, greasy pitch – and it produced similar bitty, tangled results.
The Stormers can’t have missed the memo from those two games, right? Breakdown pressure to slow our ruck is more effective than high line speed and numbers our short passing game is designed to hurt.
Look at this sequence against Glasgow, though, and see how they react on a long-ish sequence of possession near the 22.
Lots of focus on two-man hits, lots of focus on getting numbers into the line for a blitz, and not a lot of focus on breakdown pressure. If you look at this clip, you’ll see Glasgow getting a good return from trucking the ball really tight to the ruck to prevent Stormers from fanning out and pressing our action off #10. That has to be a feature of our game here.
If Stormers repeat this pattern today – we’ll win and win well. Stormers kick, on average about once every 5/6 passes this season so we absolutely will get enough possession to check out their tendencies in defence initially. Essentially, they kick contestably from their own 10m line or thereabouts and then look to pump you with heavy line speed so you’re always playing on the back foot or swinging a boot and handing possession back to them.
It’s important to play with impetus against the Stormers because, as I saw in the second half against Glasgow, they are quite good at managing territory and they’ll try to do that against On Ball sides. They are saying – you can have the ball, but only behind your 10m line and only with our edge blitz challenging your passing game.
We will kick a little bit more, as a result, but I don’t see us going too far with it. Only Glasgow kick less than us and shorter than us in the URC – I don’t see our tendencies changing here. At the same time, I think it’ll always be sensible for Crowley, Daly and Frisch to probe in behind the likes of Loader and Zas when we work the ball to the edge and pressure the positional work of Gelant in the backfield. With any edge press, their fullback’s coverage is a key part of their defence and Gelant tends to lose concentration.
If we can hold our concentration at the breakdown, the win will come.
