It’s been 98 days since Munster last ran onto Thomond Park in a competitive game, and 98 days since they walked off it in defeat to Glasgow.
It’d be nice to think that a new season starts with a fresh slate but, in reality, that’s never fully the case. Your start to the season is defined by how the previous one ended in almost every facet. That doesn’t mean you have to dwell on the past or overanalyze a season that ends in defeat – that does players no good, for example – but to pretend that this game against Connacht doesn’t exist in the context of the defeat to Glasgow would be foolish.
Last season, I think the URC title win from the previous season gave us a lot of momentum coming into the season up until, say, December, which masked a lot of poor results. We played 10 games between Europe and the URC to that point and only won four. The heat didn’t come on properly until the end of January when we lost two from three across the URC and Europe. We only lost two of the next fourteen games, but those two games were knockouts.
We can’t strip out the context of a biblical injury crisis in the first half of the season which reached its nadir during a run in December where we won once on the first of the month but then failed to win again until mid-January but that’s almost my point; the trophy won in the previous season kept the heat off until results were seriously in the pan.
This season, there is only the bitter aftertaste of clapping Glasgow Warriors off the field in Thomond Park to keep the heat away so, essentially, that means no protection at all.
Munster cannot afford a slow start to the season this year. Not only that, I believe the slow starts to the previous two seasons have turned bad injury crises into disastrous ones as each loss brings a need to redeem the next week. By the end of last season, the variance in Munster’s squads from around March on was minimal – players came back from Six Nations duty, but that’s about it. It seems like we peaked away in South Africa in April because by the time May and June rolled around against Connacht, Edinburgh, Ulster, Ospreys and Glasgow we looked battle-hardened to the point of weariness.
All of that comes back to the bad start – we had no other logical choice but to double down on cohesion and run the squad tight. Throw in a few badly timed injuries at the end of the season to game-changers like Jager, Ahern and Nankivell as well as RG Snyman returning from South Africa like the Monstars from Space Jam had abducted him on the way home and it all adds up to us looking nothing like the team who, ostensibly, had finished top of the league when the playoffs rolled around.
We know we can finish seasons strongly but my point is that we shouldn’t have to. We have six URC games between now and the November test window to get the 20 points that should put us in place to hit the three games in November/December and then the second half of the season strongly. Our opening schedule is slightly lighter this time around – with the South African tour in October, rather than April – so let’s make life a little easier for ourselves. You do that by winning, especially at home and especially in interpros.
We know a lot about Connacht in that we played and beat them out the gate earlier in the season but it would be a stretch to assume the same result this time around. Both sides will be scrappy, bedding in new combinations and prone to making a tonne of mistakes on both sides of the ball; the question will be who can find a rhythm first.
Either way, the winner will see their season off to the perfect start with a tough interpro out of the way in round 1.
The loser will already be feeling the flames flicking at their calves.
Munster: 15. Mike Haley; 14. Thaakir Abrahams, 13. Tom Farrell, 12. Alex Nankivell, 11. Shane Daly; 10. Billy Burns, 9. Craig Casey; 1. Jeremy Loughman, 2. Diarmuid Barron (c), 3. John Ryan; 4. Jean Kleyn, 5. Fineen Wycherley; 6. Ruadhán Quinn, 7. John Hodnett, 8. Gavin Coombes.
Replacements: 16. Niall Scannell, 17. Josh Wycherley, 18. Oli Jager, 19. Alex Kendellen, 20. Jack O’Donoghue, 21. Ethan Coughlan, 22. Tony Butler, 23. Seán O’Brien.
Connacht: 15. Santiago Cordero; 14. Mack Hansen, 13. Piers O’Conor, 12. Cathal Forde, 11. Shayne Bolton; 10. Josh Ioane, 9. Ben Murphy; 1. Denis Buckley, 2. Dave Heffernan, 3. Jack Aungier, 4. Joe Joyce, 5. Darragh Murray, 6. Josh Murphy, 7. Conor Oliver, 8. Cian Prendergast (c)
Replacements: 16. Dylan Tierney-Martin, 17. Peter Dooley, 18. Sam Illo, 19. Oisín Dowling, 20. Shamus Hurley-Langton, 21. Caolin Blade, 22. David Hawkshaw, 23. Sean Jansen.
Connacht’s recent run of good results against Munster – particularly in the Dexcom, but it applies in Thomond Park too – has been built on their ability to prey on our mistakes and force us onto the back foot from both a playing and emotional energy perspective.
Last season, before the game that we ultimately won in Thomond Park, my theory was that without JJ Hanrahan, Connacht would revert to the counter-transition style game that had been so effective for them under Andy Friend. Why? Jack Carty had to come back in for the injured Hanrahan and Carty’s best feature is the length, variety and quality of his kicking game. It played into the general build of Connacht’s team that day too with multiple jackal threats in their pack and midfield. They duly adjusted from what we had seen for most of the season and played a very vertical game in the first 40 minutes that relied on kicking long, stuffing us on defensive transition and then going hard at the breakdown around the fringe, in the near space off #9 with their back row build made entirely of small forwards and the wider channels through Aki. They were unlucky not to go in at halftime ahead on the scoreboard.
They had to adjust in the second half when they conceded a sucker punch try off an intercept and duly got walloped.
My question is this; what way does Pete Wilkins actually want Connacht to play? He couldn’t have avoided the conclusion of what worked against Munster in the first half last season but that in-game strategy was incongruous with how Connacht approached the majority of the rest of the season.
Across the full URC season, no team kicked less often in raw terms than Connacht and they were in the bottom half of the league for percentage of possessions kicked (41%). When you go back and look at the data from our most recent victory over them you see a Pass to Kick ratio of 1:16.6 off 11 kicks but that was almost entirely built on a completely ineffectual second half.
As I wrote in the Wally Ratings for this fixture last season;
When Connacht have had a Pass to Kick ratio higher than 12 this season, they’ve lost by an average of 31 points against Bordeaux, Lions and now Munster. Why? Because Connacht’s attack structure is pretty basic. When they aren’t kicking at a high volume, they are pretty easy to defend in settled phase play. Basic pass options, basic structures and basic ideas. If you stay error-free, they’ll go back and forth phase after phase without ever really challenging you with something you haven’t seen or overwhelming power. Their system is very Irish – 3-2-X shape with a lot of tip-on action but if you stay out of the rucks and track the flow of the ball, you should always have numbers.
But all the evidence suggests that this is how Wilkins wants Connacht to play. His signings this off-season – scrumhalf Ben Murphy, flyhalf Josh Ioane and midfielder/fullback Piers O’Conor, all of whom start here – are not massively suited to playing high kicking volume, high patience counter-transition rugby. Ioane, in particular, is all about using his explosive pace and agility to scorch away from defensive cover off the screen and in that 3/4 space.
O’Conor, too, is used to being in a Bristol environment that plays beyond the second receiver on 13.5% of their plays. Who played beyond the second receiver more than any other team in the URC last season? Connacht. Has Peter Wilkins signed O’Conor, Ioane and Santiago Cordero – and started all of them in this game – to track and hold defensive transition sets while also selecting a lineout dominant back five?
It would be an interesting approach, let’s put it that way.
My theory is that Peter Wilkins has decided that Connacht need to double down on last season, as opposed to changing their overall attacking strategy too wildly.
But the facts are that no side in the URC converted fewer of their linebreaks into tries than Connacht. That led to being in the bottom half of the table for 22 entries, while also being in the bottom half of the table for converting those entries to points. Have they fixed that in the off-season? Does Mack Hansen and Santiago Cordero help them over the line with this style?
Is he intending to go through longer sequences of possession this season? Is he hoping that making Mark Sexton the solo attack coach unlocks what wasn’t working last season?
These are all questions that Munster must try to answer for him on Saturday.
For Munster, our job here is relatively simple; improve our lineout, and improve our conversion in the 22.
By way of an example, last season, we were fourth in the league for engineering 22 entries but seventh overall for converting those entries into points. That scans quite well with the eye test from last season where it seemed the closer we got to the try-line, the more difficult it became to score. On the defensive side of the ball, we matched up quite well with the Connacht of last season in that they struggled to get enough 22 entries to make their game run, while we were the second-best team in the league for denying entry to our 22.
If we can improve the former while maintaining the latter, we’ll win this game.
I genuinely believe that if our lineout was anywhere close to elite level consistently last season, we’d have gone deeper in Europe and likely won the URC, even while looking as weary as we did in June.
We were bottom four for lineouts completed, which isn’t good enough for Munster Rugby. There are several reasons for that but you can boil it down to this, I think;
Our first-choice hookers were injured for the entire season – one for the first half, the other for the second – while we were going through a generational injury crisis in the second row and tried to compensate for both by overcomplicating our lineout schemes, which lead to too many fumbled set pieces.
Why, when our lineout was so unreliable, were we in the top three in the URC for lineouts thrown to the middle and the tail? 16% of all our lineouts went to the tail and 44% went to the middle, enough for us to rank fourth in the league for throwing to that zone.
We were in the bottom four for throws to the front. Is that because we were missing our best front jumper for basically the entire season?
Jean Kleyn is a vital player for this team, both as a scrummager and as a key lineout player. His front jumping is top-class – and a unique skill in its own right – while his scrummaging will only add to our best in the league form if he can stay fit.
It’s true for this game and the entire season; if we can’t get our lineout where it needs to be, we won’t reach the potential that is clearly in this squad. Kleyn’s fitness and long-term availability are crucial to that.
