You can afford to drop a few Ls on the road but at home, you can’t afford to do anything other than churn out Ws.
Just imagine it’s the TOP14. Losing away from home there is not fine, per see, but it’s done with the expectation that winning your home games is the fuel of any title challenge.
If Munster can go unbeaten at home this season and pick up a bonus point in half of the eight remaining games we have, we would only need 3/4 wins on the road from our remaining six games to finish around 4th/5th going on last season’s run-in. See? It’s easy.
If only it was.
The United Rugby Championship has removed a lot of the home bankers that would have been commonplace as recently as two years ago. We all played a dance back then. You rotate away to us most of the time, we’ll do the same for you most of the time and we’ll see how it shakes out in the end. There were exceptions, of course, when one team needed a result or spied an opportunity. A good example of this is the practically full-strength side Edinburgh brought to Musgrave Park in 2019/20 in between two home games in Europe against Saracens and Racing 92 when Munster would have to rotate. Edinburgh won and that did enough to nip the top of the conference for them that year.
You targeted games because you know there were some you could afford to lose. You never enjoy losing – no one ever does – but you understood there were battles you could lose as long as you win whatever war you’ve planned.
For Munster, the three defeats on the road so far mean that we have to win this game to keep the window we have to qualify for the playoffs and the Heineken Cup open in a way that doesn’t demand heroics on the road elsewhere.
You could pick easier opponents for a game of this importance than the powerful, imposing Vodacom Bulls but that’s the United Rugby Championship at the moment. Nothing easy.
Vodacom Bulls: 15. Kurt-Lee Arendse, 14. Cornal Hendricks, 13. Lionel Mapoe, 12. Harold Vorster, 11. Wandisile Simelane, 10. Johan Goosen, 9. Embrose Papier; 1. Simphiwe Matanzima, 2. Jan-Hendrik Wessels, 3. Mornay Smith, 4. Walt Steenkamp, 5. Ruan Nortje, 6. Marcell Coetzee (c), 7. WJ Steenkamp, 8. Elrigh Louw
Replacements: 16. Bismarck du Plessis, 17. Dylan Smith, 18. Jacques Van Rooyen, 19. Ruan Vermaak, 20. Marco van Staden, 21. Zak Burger, 22. Chris Smith, 23. David Kriel
Over the last two games, Munster have reduced our Pass Per Carry ratio from 1.5 against both Cardiff and the Dragons to 1.3 against Zebre and 1.4 against Connacht.
Are you in any way shocked that our numbers of defenders beaten and metres gained metric has fallen way down on what was an overperformance in those particular metrics relative to our actual results in the first two games? I’m not. For what we’re trying to do to work, we have to be well north of 1.4 when it comes to our Pass Per Carry ratio because that shows intent.
No two games are the same, of course, but I did find it interesting that when our intent to pass the ball multiple times per phase dipped – intentionally or just by how the game played out – our metrics for beating defenders fell way back on what they had been.
Now – some weak ass ball-carrying and weak follow-up breakdown work don’t help any attacking system. This, for example, was around 30 minutes into last Friday’s game against Connacht and showcases all the things that have undermined Munster’s attack for years – a tight five forward getting driven away from his ruck support by an opposition defender, followed up by some powderpuff breakdown work.
That kind of thing is a killer but we are where we are on that one. Niall Scannell isn’t going to become Malcolm Marx with the ball in hand anytime soon and Jack O’Donoghue isn’t going to become someone with Andrew Porter’s killer instincts around the breakdown.
You have to work around that for now. That element of our game needs constant attention but it’s not the killer it was earlier in the season – and maybe our lower PPC has something to do with that. We didn’t need to be lightning-quick at the breakdown to produce high-quality chances against Connacht – we just needed more composure.
What should be working better – and what was a strength last year – is our lineout work. Sure, it degraded towards the end of the season but we ran at 89% overall in the URC and it at least gave us a platform to launch off consistently. What you do after that belongs to the attack but your set piece needs to give you a reliable platform or you’re feeding off scraps.
So far this season we’re down around 80% completion off the lineout which is sub-elite by any professional standard. Even that 80% number doesn’t fully tell the story of how scrappy our lineout work has been. We have the second-highest amount of lost lineouts in the URC so far this season. To give you an idea of how bad that is – remember how bad Zebre’s lineout was against us in Musgrave Park? They’re #1 for lost lineouts and they only have five more than we do.
As ever, the lineout isn’t just on the hooker, even though Scannell and Buckley have struggled to hit their targets at times. For me, the biggest issue seems to be players either (a) stepping outside their launch points or (b) getting confused as to who is lifting on a given route and then leaving it too late to effect an effective lift.
This is something that should really have been dialled in on at this stage and our troubles in the lineout have cost us repeatedly in the last four games. The Bulls – an extremely good defensive lineout team – will no doubt have sensed our weaknesses here to date and will try to bully us in the air as Connacht did so well last Friday.
Is that part of the reason why we’ve gone for a three-lock pack this weekend? The addition of Edogbo to our starting rotation gives us three 6’6″+ jumpers to hit or decoy on as well as having one of the best pace jumpers in the game in Peter O’Mahony as a secondary target. In the last few games I’ve felt we’ve played small and, as a result, have had to overcomplicate our lineout. This back five selection allows us to circumnavigate that problem for the full 80 minutes and maybe start to cause a little trouble in the air ourselves, especially as the game heads into the last quarter.
