[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]N[/su_dropcap]ine points clear, four games left, two wins from a final – that’s the rough equation for Munster this Friday night in Cardiff. That equation could well change depending on how Connacht go in Treviso around the same time on Friday night that isn’t in Munster’s control and plays no role in this game other than adding a potential X factor depending on our result.
Put simply, another win on the road here will see Munster take a further giant step on the way to a PRO14 final.
Whatever happens next, so many eyes will be trained on the guy wearing #22 on the Munster teamsheet on Friday night – none other than Joey Carbery. Carbery’s injury-enforced absences have been brutal for Munster and Ireland. You don’t sign a guy like Joey Carbery – and Munster really made a big play for him in the early summer of 2018 – without intending for your attack to revolve around him as a primary playmaker. The first couple of months with Carbery at #10 were massively encouraging but the last time he played regularly on a week-to-week basis for Munster was January 2019.
Injuries have been a consistent feature of his career since that point, for both club and country.
It’s hard to say how Munster would have gone in 2019 and 2020 with a fully fit Joey Carbery running the show at #10 because, on the one hand, JJ Hanrahan has stood in for him pretty well. On the other hand, teams who are without their #1 flyhalf for long stretches can’t but suffer at some point from game-to-game or even phase-for-phase; otherwise, the player they are missing isn’t really their top playmaker.
For me, Joey Carbery fully fit and at his best is probably starting for Ireland in the Six Nations consistently but we can’t think about him in those terms until he’s fully completed his comeback, on which this game is another step on the right track. Munster have been very careful not to rush Carbery and his presence here is the result of months of careful, dedicated rehab by the Munster physios and S&C department, let alone the long, hard road Carbery himself has been on. Expectations will be high but they have to be kept in check until Carbery can gradually build on-field minutes back into his system and see how it goes this week.
With all that said, man, it’s good to see this guy back.
Our opposition this week, the Cardiff Blues, have a different set of priorities. They started the season relatively poorly but a run of good results since they brought in Dai Young as interim head coach in early January – two wins from three with two of those coming home and away against the Scarlets – has seen them move into range of the Scarlets in the Champions Cup places. They’re just four points back from their West Wales rivals and with the Scarlets facing a tricky trip to Edinburgh this weekend, there’s a real opportunity for the Blues to crank the pressure.
For me, the Blues are one of the most underrated teams in the tournament. Munster might have won our last two games against the Blues but it wasn’t too long ago that we got a lousy beating here by a broadly similar Cardiff outfit. Taking too much stock in Connacht’s big win last weekend would be a mistake, in my opinion. The Blues were great for the first 30/35 minutes of that game and the manner in which they lost control of the scoreboard in the last five minutes of the first half and the last 10/15 minutes of the second is uncharacteristic going on what I’ve seen of them under Dai Young.
This has the potential to be a very tight game, especially with both sides without the bulk of their current test contingent.
Cardiff Blues: 15. Matthew Morgan, 14. Owen Lane, 13. Mason Grady, 12. Rey Lee-Lo, 11. Aled Summerhill; 10. Ben Thomas, 9. Jamie Hill; 1. Corey Domachowski, 2. Kirby Myhill, 3. Dmitri Arhip, 4. Seb Davies, 5. Rory Thornton, 6. Shane Lewis-Hughes, 7. Ellis Jenkins, 8. Josh Turnbull (c)
Replacements: 16. Liam Belcher, 17. Theo Bevacqua, 18. Keiron Assiratti, 19. James Ratti, 20. Olly Robinson, 21. Lewis Jones, 22. Dan Fish, 23. Max Llewellyn.
The Blues side that we played back in October gave us a bit of a fright for large stretches of the game.
Cardiff were within four points as the game moved into the last 15 minutes until a top-class try finished off by JJ Hanrahan put the game to bed with a relatively healthy-looking scoreline. They’ve changed head coach since then but they still operate in broadly the same way.
I really like the way that the Blues have been building over the last few seasons. The loss of Gareth Anscombe is a blow that I feel Cardiff will only fully recover from when Rhys Priestland joins from Bath next season. Cardiff have been playing some nice stuff but they’re struggling to construct the opportunities they are clearly creating (4th highest number of linebreaks in the league) into tries (9th in the league). From a goal kicking perspective, too, I’ve felt they’ve struggled for consistency – Priestland will certainly help with that – but they shouldn’t really want for creativity as is.
Earlier in the season, Cardiff were playing a 3-2-2 variant but it seems like they’ve transitioned to running a 1-3-3-1 shape pretty consistently over the last couple of games.
It makes sense structurally speaking. They generally run with two playmakers at 10 and 15, two strike-running midfielders and a pair of power wingers in their backline. Even with their international commitments, Young sticking to these role-sets. They’ve paired Rey Lee-Lo with the explosive 18-year-old, 6’4″ Mason Grady in midfield and while he’s very inexperienced – how could he not be at 18 (!) years of age – he’s got the physicality and explosivity to trouble Munster in Cardiff’s system.
Cardiff’s system is based on getting width on their structure to create multi-vectored opportunities for their midfield and power wingers in the channel. The last time we played Cardiff, they would use this 3-3-1 shape as a secondary shape as part of a 3-2-2 package. Essentially, they would use a 3-2-2 to get full width across the field and then morph to a 3-3-1 as they came back across the field with their midfield and power wingers sliding to outside wide positions. There will be turnover opportunities when they release wide to the lone forward on this structure because they rely on their power wingers and midfield to be primary cleaners – there will be opportunities for Chris Cloete and others when that side is being cleaned by Summerhill and Grady.
The key principle on Cardiff’s structure is width.
You’ll often see them set up just like this, with a pod of three forwards aligning quite centrally off their playmaker, which will usually be their #10 or Matthew Morgan.
Cardiff will really stress the range of their halfback passing radius to get as much lateral distance as possible on this structure to get the ball to the central three pod.
They will then reset wide again with either Morgan or Thomas bridging the space between another three-pod with flat kicking options for the wide power winger and layered options if they want to split the three pod to a screened midfield runner in this instance.
Navidi is the “lone wolf” at the edge of the 3-3-1 shape in this instance but this weekend it could be anyone from their back five.
They’ve also built a nice offload “hook” into this structure with the tailing run of their screened pod of three forwards. Cardiff will look for the unused forwards to go through the screen in these wide flow situations, run ahead of the play and then hook across to act as an offload target for someone like Lee-Lo or Grady as they surge into the wide space.
I’ve highlighted the action here;
You can see how they flow across the pitch in the 1-3-3-1 quite clearly here and how they hook those offload lines when they use the three pod as a screen. A lot of importance falls on the accuracy of their wide passing off their playmaker but especially their scrumhalf. Tomos and Lloyd Williams, the Blues Welsh test scrumhalf pairing, are key parts of their preferred structure. A 1-3-3-1 shape is incredibly reliant on long, accurate passing from #9 to give the bridging playmaker (#10/#15 in the Blues system) time to link the pods up with the previous ruck, play into the screen, kick through or have a cut against the grain if he sees defenders in front of him drifting out.
Getting good eyeline pressure on Thomas – someone like Fineen Wycherley running a hard blitz line on that bridging playmaker – will be an important part of upsetting Cardiff’s shape. Using a picture from earlier, good pressure and width on that joint between the last ruck and the three pod could force Thomas to readjust and if he comes back inside, it opens up opportunities for our jackals.
If Munster can prevent Cardiff from getting their wide surge game into gear, there will be opportunities for us off the lineout, scrum, through the maul and on maul breaks.
