Benetton are not the Benetton side you might have in your mind from seasons gone by.

The old Benetton – the whipping boys in green and white of a few seasons back – have been replaced with a physical, high tempo side that’s capable of beating pretty much anyone on their day. Their day might well be today.

To get an idea of how Benetton have improved, all you need to do it look back just two seasons ago. In 2016/2017, Benetton finished 10th in the then PRO12 with 23 points from 22 games. Last season, they finished fifth in Conference B with 55 points from 21 games. This season, with two regular-season games remaining, Benetton have 52 points and lie third in Conference B – one point ahead of Edinburgh and two points behind Ulster.

To put that in context, the other side to make that kind of jump – from 9th in 2016/2017 to 3rd in Conference B in 2017/2018 to playoff contention again this season – is Edinburgh under Richard Cockerill.

The work that Keiran Crowley has managed on a relatively small budget in North Eastern Italy is something really worthy of praise. At this stage in Italian rugby’s development, there isn’t a massive pipeline of PRO14 ready Italian players that Crowley could slot into the side and hope to be competitive as Benetton have been. That’s the idea – obviously – but it’s a few years away from fruition. For now, they have to recruit incredibly cleverly and Crowley has managed that superbly for the most part. The players he’s grafted onto Benetton’s existing structures have really added value for them.

In 2017/2018, Crowley added Sebastian Negri, Federico Ruzza, Marco Riccioni, Irné Herbst, and Monty Ioane to his squad. Ahead of this season, Crowley signed Marco Zanon, Iliesa Ratuva Tavuyara, Derrick Appiah, Dewaldt Duvenage and Toa Halafihi. Ahead of next season, they’ve got Eli Snyman and Ian Keatley on the way. Thirteen of their matchday squad for this game were brought to the club under Crowley’s guidance.

So, as you might imagine, the guys who Crowley has brought in are perfectly suited to playing the type of rugby Benetton are trying to play, which sounds ridiculously obvious but so many teams try to play the rugby they think they should be playing, rather than the rugby that actually suits the players they have. I’ve pretty recent experience of a club in Italy looking at why they were having so much trouble with their pack. They wanted to play a conservative, kicking based pressure game that was heavy on challenging at the set piece.

(1) They didn’t have the tactical kicking game to do this reliably.

(2) They had a pack that they drilled hard at scrum and lineout but were too undersized as a unit.

In essence, they would kick a lot of their own ball away, only manage to earn a challengable set-piece in a decent position half the time and were getting blown off the ball in the scrum and maul by teams that were just as skilled as they were but, crucially, were much bigger. They had hit a skill brick wall and were getting dominated physically by bigger teams. Their coach wanted them to play a game that they didn’t have the players to execute properly. To play that pressure game, you need a great tactical kicker – two preferably – and a relatively dominant defensive scrum and lineout compared to your opposition to force the opposition into mistakes that you can then capitalise on.

Crowley knows that playing a “traditional” Italian style would be suicide in the PRO14. They were playing a hodgepodge of that style pre-Crowley and the best it got them was a 10th place finish out of 12 in the seven years preceding the move to a PRO14. They have a different style now – and it works for them.

Red Eye Report :: Benetton (a)

I’ve decided to change this up slightly. I’ll be assessing specific facets of the opposition’s set piece, defensive structure and other stuff in the Blood & Thunder Podcast – and here – so here I thought it would be cool to show where I rate the opposition (and Munster) as a whole in a European context as first choice units and then, depending on the how far away both Munster and the opposition are from what I would consider “full strength”, how the teams actually taking the field rate against each other.

S – Elite level
A – Top European Level
B – Good Domestic League Level
C – Average Domestic League Level
D – Poor Domestic League Level
E – Minor League Minnow 

Guinness PRO14 Round #20: Benetton vs Munster

Full Strength Red Eye Rating: Benetton (B-) – Munster (A+)
Teamsheet Adjusted Red Eye Rating: Benetton (B-) – Munster (B-)
Current PRO14 Form Over Last 5 Games: Benetton Home Form (WWWWW) – Munster Away Form (LWWWL)

Wide Impact

So what is Benetton’s style?

It’s hard to nail down any team’s style into a few sentences but we can get an idea of what they want to do by looking at what they want to avoid.

Benetton – and Tomasso Allan in particular – will try to keep the ball infield when they kick unless they can try to get one of Tavuyara or Ioane running onto a shallow, angled kick from the flanks.

Benetton want transition events so you’ll often see Hayward or Allan booting the ball down the middle of the field to invite a kickback – where they’ll attack through Hayward, Allan, Tavuyara and Ioane with the latter two players in particular well capable of flinging an offload to a support runner. Ioane and Tavuyara have 29 and 27 offloads between them this season, so I’d expect the same to continue here.

Benetton don’t really want to contest too many lineouts because they’re defensive maul is prone to opposition teams twisting it infield with long builds, and they don’t really have a lot of elite counter-jumpers in their pack. If the opposition has a lot of lineout possession, Benetton can start looking very ordinary very quickly. They can get driven in the maul, Allan starts taking a lot of contact off maul breaks or balls off the top and Zanon – a pretty lightweight defender by PRO14 standards – is forced into defensive situations he just isn’t suited for. Munster will really want to go after Benetton off the top of full lineouts directly into Allan and Zanon, regardless of where Zanon is defending (#12/#13).

They avoid kicking the ball off the field unless they are kicking to a very advantageous point in the field. They can box kick but they aren’t a remarkably good team in the air.

They kick infield to avoid defending too many lineouts in their own half of the field. They can play a little too much ball when they’re in their own half of the field, too, which is a knock on effect to wanting to avoid too many lineouts. Allan is a good kicker of the ball but he’s not got too many probing touchfinders in his arsenal, even though he’s a good chip kicker.

When they have the ball, Benetton constantly look for width and isolations – but a certain kind of width.

On big openside plays, you’ll see Benetton play in one of two ways.

When they play off #10, it’ll generally look like this;

Allan hits a strike zone runner going right at a defender inside the edge of the defensive.

Why does he do this? It sets a fold point for Benetton to try and exploit. Leinster suffered here because they didn’t have a natural jackal (Penny will get there but he’s very young yet) to disrupt Benetton as they searched for this width.

By hitting this point in Leinster’s defensive line, Benetton could assess the quality of Leinster’s fold around the ruck point. In this instance, I think Benetton took a poor option – they kicked instead of hitting back against the grain to test out Tomane and McGrath on the edge of this line.

With Allan, Ioane and a few others working with an outside angle, I think Crowley might be asking his scrumhalf for a different decision here.

The key part of this width from #10 is to force a numbers imbalance at the point of impact on the defensive line.

The two men isolated here – Tracy and O’Brien – will demand support as the ruck recycles and it’s this need to man the imbalanced side that Benetton will try to use to attack against the grain and use offloads to pick off isolated defenders.

Here they are again;

They attack the third defender from the edge and then attack the isolation. Watch Allan’s break beyond the gainline after his initial pass as he waits for the second touch – this is Benetton when they’re really flowing off centre-field position. They’ll go after that third defender from the edge any chance they get and especially when you see Allan standing with a pod of forwards outside him – you can almost predict where they’re going. That’s where a jackal like Cloete can come into play. If you can attack that edge ruck position – and Cloete will be coming at this from the inside shoulder – then you can slow down Benetton and force them to reset.

Allan’s break after the pass is a key part of Benetton’s work off these central positions.

I think Crowley will have wanted a little more width on this example – the ball carrier stepped inside at the last minute rather than outside onto the third last defender – and it made Leinster’s job a little easier.

Benetton are well capable of hurting you off #9 too, as they have a side built for carrying in relatively close quarters. This is a typical structure off #9 for them.

That’s a good hard carry, and the ruck from Ruzza is a good example of how they can punish non-dominant tackles. When Benetton start carrying off #9 you need to hit them with double tackles to draw in support numbers and get a jackal over every second or third phase when you can.

Leinster were happy to stay out of the rucks and try to go phase for phase with them but that’s not a great idea when Benetton get into the 22. They’re very good at holding onto the ball and grinding out phases if you let them.

The likes of Steyn, Negri, Ruzza and Halafihi aren’t the most subtle of ball carriers – or the quickest when it comes to changing direction – but they make ground in a tight, straight line. We have to punish Benetton’s breakdown work which can be sloppy and punishable by a picky referee like Ben Whitehouse.

Munster will be up against it here. We’re down a lot of our top guys and Benetton are on a real run at home as of late. They have got the best record in Conference B over the last five games, in fact. Munster can win – but we’ll need to punch the bruise that Benetton are hiding.

• Attack the power gap between the last forward and the backline on phase play and off the set piece. Getting at Steyn and Negri’s lack of pace off the scrum will be important and exploitable with Hanrahan looking to break back inside off scrum in particular.
• Box kick to pressure Ioane and Tavuyara’s kicking game and defensive positioning.
• Attack their breakdown when it comes to that edge attack. Force them to narrow their range and double on the tackles until they’re forced to kick.
• Attack through the maul and put pressure on their throw by attacking Herbst, Steyn and Negri’s speed into the air with Wycherley and O’Donoghue. That’ll open up Holland to get a read on Ruzza’s timing and pressure Bigi’s throw.

There are a lot of younger Munster players with a real shot to make a statement for this season and the season to come. It’s a big opportunity.