It was a bruising winter block.
You know it, I know it, the team know it.
In some ways, the bruising isn’t over yet — Mike Prendergast will be leaving the club at the end of this coming season — but that’s for another time and another article.
For now, it’s back to the URC, back to Thomond Park and back to face Zebre, the team who arguably triggered the great period of change and uncertainty that led to McMillan taking over as head coach last summer. Zebre were like the sock you keep dropping from the washing basket — when you finally snap, it’s not really the sock’s fault, and the sock doesn’t care that you snapped anyway. It’s a sock. The problems are bigger than that.
This season, a loss to Zebre — or even a narrow enough win — would not be as existentially damaging as it was last year because, to an extent, that particular boil has been lanced.
We are where we deserve to be. That is to say, 6th in the URC and in the Challenge Cup knockouts for only the second time ever, the last time in 2011 when we lost at home to Harlequins in a Challenge Cup semi-final.
That was a sign that the good times — Munster as perennial favourites to make European finals — were over, or that they soon would be, even with the bounce-back to a European Cup semi-final the season after. We thought we were a temporarily embarrassed aristocracy in 2011, but we don’t have the same delusions of grandeur this time. It’s why we’ll take this challenge of playing Zebre during a test window incredibly seriously.
We know what we are at the moment, and there’s a strength to that, even in the disappointing results of the last few weeks. We can only hope it’s on the road to where we want to be, where we need to be in the seasons to come.
For now, we need four, ideally five, points against Zebre to nail down our place in the top six before a trip to South Africa that we’re genuinely looking forward to as it stands — a big trip away, no distractions, and hard ground.
Going there with 40 points isn’t the worst spot to be in, but we can’t get carried away against a team that has given us — and others — a fine black eye in the last season or so. Zebre aren’t the slap-around duds they’ve been cast as in the decade, not anymore, so any win here will have to be earned early and put away decisively.
Munster Rugby: 15. Mike Haley; 14. Calvin Nash, 13. Tom Farrell, 12. Dan Kelly, 11. Shane Daly; 10. JJ Hanrahan, 9. Paddy Patterson; 1. Michael Milne, 2. Niall Scannell, 3. Michael Ala’alatoa; 4. Jean Kleyn, 5. Fineen Wycherley; 6. Gavin Coombes, 7. Jack O’Donoghue (c), 8. Brian Gleeson.
Replacements: 16. Lee Barron, 17. Josh Wycherley, 18. John Ryan, 19. Edwin Edogbo, 20. Alex Kendellen, 21. Ethan Coughlan, 22. Tom Wood, 23. Seán O’Brien
Zebre Parma: 15. Giovanni Montemauri; 14. Albert Einstein Batista, 13. Giulio Bertaccini, 12. Damiano Mazza, 11. Simone Gesi; 10. Giacomo Da Re, 9. Gonzalo García; 1. Juan Pitinari, 2. Giampietro Ribaldi, 3. Enrique Pieretto, 4. Matteo Canali, 5. Alessandro Ortombina; 6. Bautista Stavile, 7. Samuele Locatelli, 8. Giacomo Ferrari (c)
Replacements: 16. Giovanni Quattrini, 17. Paolo Buonfiglio, 18. Luca Franceschetto, 19. Guido Volpi, 20. Iacopo Bianchi, 21. Thomas Dominguez, 22. Martin Roger Farias, 23. Marco Zanon
Small Margins
In this week’s Presser, Clayton McMillan mentioned how tight the margins have been on Munster’s losses at home this season, and he was dead right, but he could have applied that to our entire season so far, and it would have been mostly accurate.
Everything about our season — the good and the bad — has been on margins so fine they are almost a statistical anomaly.
- Our net PPE is positive (+0.14) on the season, meaning we’re outscoring opponents per 22 entry on average, but only just. The margin is incredibly slim.
- We’re more clinical on the road (higher attacking PPE away than at home), and that probably won’t shock you if you’ve watched through the season. We do generate fewer entries away from Thomond Park, though, but we are better at executing them. That has to change pretty soon.
- The Bath away game is the massive outlier defensively — 5.7 pts/entry and 6 tries from just 7 entries was an extraordinary opposition conversion rate, and it drags down our rolling efficiency quite a bit.
- Ulster away was the attacking nadir — just 2 entries into the 22 and zero tries, a desperately poor performance, the worst of the season so far and down there with the worst of last season pre-Rowntree’s departure.
- We’ve scored 4+ tries in 7 of our 15 games, often from modest entry counts (6–8 entries), suggesting we can be genuinely clinical finishers on our day, but it has really has to be our game. These games often coincide with a higher kicking count and a more transitional, counter-punching style, which is interesting from a style perspective.
- The Castres and Dragons home games are a defensive concern — both saw opponents convert at 4.0+ pts/entry in Cork and Limerick. We can’t afford that against Zebre, who have a similar profile to both teams, and we’ll be playing in broadly similar conditions to the Dragons game on Saturday night.
Our average points conceded per entry and scored per entry across the season are identical, which goes a long way to explain just how tight almost all of our games have felt.
The big outlier here is that, while our defence is pretty good across most of the season, our attack has been the drag on results from a raw results basis. If we classify an “elite” attacking output as around 2.8/3.0 points per entry, you can get a visual on how many points we’re leaving on the field.
That would have qualified us for the Champions Cup knockouts in second place, and currently have us sitting in second place in the URC — all on just a marginal improvement in attacking efficiency from 2.43 to 2.8, even if the defensive performance stayed the same.
That’s the challenge against Zebre this weekend. We’re generating enough entries — entries aren’t the problem — it’s our conversion of them.
This is part of the reason why I think we’ve gone with a real heavyweight back five in this game. Coombes and Gleeson in the same starting back five, alongside O’Donoghue as a combo-flanker, gives us real, proper tight carrying heft in a way that might free up Kleyn for a more support-based role.
In the last few weeks since the Glasgow game, we’ve been working on simplifying elements of our game or, rather, allowing certain parts of our game to be simple. There has been a lot of focus on our maul — trying to convert our recent lineout stability into something that can become a close-in weapon — and trying to reduce the volatility we’ve seen in the scrum across the December/January block.
I would expect us to play a slightly narrower forward block. O’Donoghue will likely be the edge outlet here, but I’d expect us to keep to narrow blocks of three and four to help set a platform in the tight channels we’ve been using all season, and that haven’t given us the contact points we’ve needed.
Coombes and Gleeson haven’t really played together in the same pack build this season, and when we have seen them — against Cardiff in the second half — we’ve had a bit more punch in the tight collisions. We’ll get to see that from the start, here, and I think it’ll improve us in contact, especially on a night that’s probably going to be pretty greasy and on a tough enough track.
Zebre have been really dangerous this season when it comes to scoring on transition — they rank highly in the metrics for tries scored on kick return and turnover — so when we do kick, or go through phases, Zebre will need to be managed correctly. They win turnovers at a pretty decent clip, so tight ball retention will be really important. They force most of their turnovers in the tackle or through line pressure, not necessarily in the ruck itself.
Our kicking profile this season has been mainly focused on short, contestable kicks. We’ve kicked at a pretty high volume and retained really well, but our distance is almost always in the short-to-mid-range.
Our kicking distance is almost directly related to our low exit success ranking, where we’re the fourth-worst team in the URC. We kick to contest almost every time, and when we don’t retain the ball back — despite our healthy retention numbers — we invite rebound pressure on ourselves more than is probably healthy.
Most of our kicking is designed to bring our generally quite good, and really aggressive defensive breakdown game into play in a spot where our forwards and midfield can easily reach. Our average kicking distance is just over 20m, so we use that distance to close the space on the drop really quickly and then swarm the potential transition. However, against Castres in particular, that tactic played against us when they were able to escape from our transition defence and get large territorial gains off the back of it.
Zebre are not as dangerous as Castres in that area of the game, but they have enough counter-punch threat there to punish us if we get it wrong on a night that will be just slippery enough to encourage a few bad reads or missed tackles in space.
We will need to play narrower, and empower our midfield and outside backline — Shane Daly selected at #11 is pretty meaningful here — to shut down any kick actions that lead to a Zebre escape.
If we can do that, the win will come as long as we don’t invite early scoreboard pressure from Zebre, who will likely fancy that early on-ball pressure might invite an over-eager penalty concession. We have to control the first ten minutes territorially. If we can, Zebre will concede those penalties instead, and then it’s up to us to convert our entries.
Discipline — tactical, defensive and penalty concession — will determine how we walk through this game.
