Leo Cullen has told Munster Rugby – the players and coaches – that we are an afterthought in Leinster’s season. His team selection for this URC semi-final would be considered heavily rotated even if it was an early season hit out but here we are in May, with a league final on the line and he leaves an entire core of his usual match winners to sit in the stands eating chips.
No Porter. No Sheehan. No Ryan. No Doris. No Gibson-Park. No Lowe. No Keenan. No Furlong. No Ringrose.
With the team he has selected here Leo Cullen is saying three things. Here are two of them.
- I have bigger fish to fry and Munster just isn’t a big enough fish for me to be concerned about right now.
- This Leinster team is just strong enough to deal with whatever Munster have to offer in the Aviva Stadium.
Every year for the past seven years, Leo Cullen has been right. Is this the year he’s wrong?
That’s for this Munster team to show.
Last season around this time of the year, actually, we were humiliated in the Aviva Stadium by a team just a little bit weaker on paper than the one we will face on Saturday.
I want you to look at this still from the coverage of this game and drink it in. Understand what it means. It’s a selection of some of Leinster’s senior players – the guys they rested en-masse for this game – having the absolute time of their lives as they watched lads so far below them on the Leinster depth chart that they can barely see them take the lead over a flailing, shaken Munster side at the Aviva Stadium.
A few minutes later during a break in play, the TV director would pan to other members of that senior Leinster squad as if to highlight just how many of them were sitting in the stands and how it didn’t matter one iota to the result. We badly needed a win – a bonus-point win, no less – in this game and, instead, we shipped our second bonus-point loss to Leinster in two months. But this wasn’t the same as Black Saturday in Thomond Park. This was actually a fair bit worse. In that game, we were humiliated and embarrassed in front of our own fans by a Leinster side featuring test Lions and multi-cap internationals. In this latest indignity, we were beaten by a squad of players that Leinster might select to take on the Dragons during a test window.
And they beat us out the gate.
This game last season was proof positive that Johann Van Graan’s Munster were a busted flush. Conor Murray and Stephen Larkham would, a week later, admit that the playing group were emotionally, mentally and physically drained by a marathon defeat to Toulouse two weeks prior.
That said it all really. The squad were too spent to pitch up and land a few shots on a Leinster B team and got duly walloped as the big boys looked on laughing. They knew they had much bigger fish to fry and that we weren’t worth even turning on the air fryer for.
What has changed in a year?
Everything.
Or so we hope.
For a start, we’ve got Tadhg Beirne and Peter O’Mahony (just) available for this game and we’ve made a decisive decision at #10 one way or the other in the aftermath of March’s loss to Glasgow. We’re playing differently than last season – radically so – and have shown more guts and character in the last three games than I’ve seen since the days of Rassie Erasmus.
We’re far from the finished article under this coaching group but happenstance has presented us with an opportunity. Leinster have a European Champions Cup final next week and they cannot be without their core of game winners for that contest.
What is the third thing that Leo Cullen might be telling us?
I hope – and it is a hope – that he’s telling us that if the Munster of Cape Town, Durban and Scotstoun show up, this game could descend into the kind of war that leads to a pyrrhic victory for a Leinster side desperately chasing a fifth star that would define that club’s Golden Age since 2017.
That is a reason we could live with – but only if we beat this Leinster team and book a place in the final. It feels like an age since a Munster side left so much as a bruise on Big Blue. This Saturday has to be the day that ends.
Leinster Rugby: 15. Jimmy O’Brien, 14. Tommy O’Brien, 13. Robbie Henshaw, 12. Charlie Ngatai, 11. Dave Kearney, 10. Harry Byrne, 9. Luke McGrath (c); 1. Michael Milne, 2. Rónan Kelleher, 3. Michael Ala’alatoa, 4. Ryan Baird, 5. Jason Jenkins, 6. Max Deegan, 7. Will Connors, 8. Jack Conan
Replacements: 16. John McKee, 17. Cian Healy, 18. Thomas Clarkson, 19. Joe McCarthy, 20. Josh van der Flier, 21. Nick McCarthy, 22. Ciarán Frawley, 23. Liam Turner
I’ve covered Leinster exhaustively this season.
They are an incredibly formidable side with very few weaknesses, even when you go into the layers of their squad. In the two games we’ve played against them this season, I think it’s fair to say that we’ve seen incremental improvement game to game but not enough to snap a ten-game losing streak since December 2018. That sentence seems incredibly hollow looking at it, right?
Improving but still losing? That ten-game losing streak is what it is, unfortunately, and there’s no hiding from it. Leinster have rotated quite a bit for this game – a little more than I thought, but not by much – however I will add that we’ve been beaten by heavily blended Leinster sides in the past, even this very season, so that in itself doesn’t mean much.
When we go back to assess the games this season I think we can look at the Aviva game in October as the higher-quality performance overall. We were right in that game for 60 minutes before we started losing multiple players to injury against a very strong Leinster selection.
One thing I’ve noticed is that outside some general themes – losing collisions, players freezing under pressure and making mistakes – we’ve lost to Leinster in a number of different ways. There’s no one neat trick that will act as a cure-all to turn relentless Ls into Ws so shiny we need shades to look at them, bossman.
From a game-state perspective, Leinster will know that they have a counter-transition kicking game that can produce off-ball results for them. Traditionally this Munster team has not been able to trouble Leinster offensively and they’ll be relying on Connors, Kelleher, Henshaw and Ngatai to cut down our multi-phase game on the kick return.
How we react to that part of their game will go a long way to deciding how the game goes. I think we want to keep the ball infield for as long as we can to stress their transition attack and the post-transition playmaking of Harry Byrne. We want to stress the passing of McGrath and then the decision-making of Harry Byrne with line speed, yes, but we have to balance that with being brave at the defensive breakdown. Munster have to compete to slow down here if we want to take Leinster off-scheme but that comes with danger too – physical and disciplinary.
Picking and choosing our moments here will be crucial.
One of the benefits of keeping Leinster in-field will be reducing the lineout position that we give them. Attacking them at the set piece is always a good idea outside your 10m line – especially with Kelleher’s throw – but it’s risk and reward. Their strike plays off the lineout are the best thing they do and it’ll be a key test of Harry Byrne to see how he manages this aspect of Leinster’s attacking arsenal.
From a defensive perspective, we absolutely cannot allow Leinster to get into a pattern of breaking and manipulating us off these lineouts so we’ll need a big day of contesting from O’Mahony, Beirne and Wycherley.
So how do we catch Leinster? It’s incredibly hard to hurt this team because they have very few weaknesses. One area I’d look to target is their tendency to contest hard on the ground with balls thrown to the front for a maul, while also attacking the lack of Andrew Porter.
It’s very rare to get a look at a first-class Leinster side without Porter so assessing their performance against the likes of Toulouse is pointless. The best map for the team selected that I found was to rewatch Leinster’s game against the Emirates Lions on their South African tour just gone.
In that game, we saw a lot of the players who will feature in this game but the player who interests me the most is Michael Milne.
It’s an unenviable task to cover for Andrew Porter who really is a one-of-a-kind prop from an athletic perspective. Being that strong and that mobile with that burst of acceleration he has in almost all directions – forward and laterally – is genuinely unique. Milne is more like a traditional loosehead prop. He’s a strong carrier, a good scrummager and he’s built like a fridge.
From a lateral movement perspective, however, he’s not the same type of player as Porter but he guards the same space.
Here’s what I’ve seen.
Lions throw to the front of a six-man lineout and Leinster don’t really compete, choosing instead to press at the front of the maul. It’s a feint, though, and the Lions break around the corner to attack Milne at the tail of the lineout.
Kriel hits Van Der Merwe who can slice up the gap between Milne at the tail and Barron (it’ll be Kelleher for Leinster here). The Lions score on this phase. The Kriel role will be played by John Hodnett in this game and they share a similar profile from a role-set perspective. Both are quick, agile on the ground and have a really strong burst of acceleration.
A few minutes later, the Lions caught Leinster again in the exact same position.
It’s the exact same scheme – a maul feint at the front to compress Leinster and isolate the tail of the lineout.
Leinster will want to keep Jenkins close to the middle and front on any lineout close to the 22 so that means our tail targets on a six-man lineout are likely to be Ryan Baird and Michel Milne. In this example, Kriel feints the pass on the same scheme and breaks inside Deeny. The Lions should have scored on this play but knocked it on at the line.
Hodnett has the agility and pace to hurt Leinster at the tail of the lineout if we can establish a threat there.
This also functions as a good building block for multi-phase attack.
Let’s look at the same basic scheme again with Milne as the target;
That gainline win prevents the front of the Leinster lineout from folding around the ruck and, in essence, traps them on the blindside for the next few phases.
Within a phase, Leinster’s tight five are still on the blindside of the play with the Lions stacking options. One screen pass and block line takes out Jenkins and Milne with Deegan covering the edge as best he can.
We can great a similar look in this game with the same action.
We run a similar kind of layered game with Crowley being enough of a two-way threat that he’ll interest any tight forward he can find in a similar space.
A phase after this, the Lions work the ball to the edge again where they pick off a frayed edge and score.
Imagine John Hodnett in a similar space with the pace and power to attack the same heavy Leinster edge. It’ll only work if we can threaten them on that first phase and I think attacking that lane around Milne if he’s the tail gunner on 5/6 man lineouts can produce results if we’re accurate.
It’ll take a few small wins to open this game up for us and, hopefully, this can be one of them.
