In this fixture last season, Munster were out-fought, out-scrapped and shithoused by a side that, for all their own failings, knew that we could be rattled. They did so and we lost a game that would cling to the rest of our season like a bad smell.
As I wrote after last year’s game;
The Bad Vibes from this game will linger long after the game and could become toxic if they aren’t blown out soon. Munster aren’t in crisis – just two losses all season – but the perception battle is being comprehensively lost about what this club is trying to do on-field and off. Two senior coaches deciding to leave – one of them after signing a new deal before activating an exit clause – before two dour performances in a row have evaporated all the feel-good factor post-Wasps. It doesn’t matter if that feel-good factor was a false impression based on beating a 14-man team who were the only side in Europe more fucked than we were with player unavailability but it felt real.
That defeat was Munster’s second of the season to that point – we had won six out of seven in the URC and Champions Cup prior to that – but it felt like the hangover you’ve been dodging with the cure showing up at 8 PM on a Sunday night. The Glenroes, essentially, but baked into a cake made of knives and dog shit.
That loss was a defining one in the Van Graan era and defined his style of rugby – completely unfairly, I might add – but that’s what happens when you lose interpros where there are real stakes on the line. There’s no change this Friday when it comes to stakes and, indeed, real, tangible pressure.
Before the Zebre game, I was in a press conference with Graham Rowntree and one of the other journos asked him if Munster were in “Must Win” territory ahead of last weekend’s game. Rowntree answered him back with a hypothetical question of his own – “show me a game that isn’t must win”. That’s true but there’s nuance to it. There are some games that you can lose and they won’t kill you. They might hurt you, hurt you badly, but people will forget them if you pay back the debt that loss incurred. The ones that kill you are the games you Can’t Lose. Lose those and things can get unpredictable.
That game last January was a Can’t Lose game for Van Graan and we all saw what happened in the aftermath.
We aren’t there yet – the context of both coaching tickets is wildly different, as is the context of the season as a whole – but we’re at the stage where we could really do with a coherent performance that shows what we can do when we aren’t coughing up breakdown penalties every other phase, throwing the ball at runners faces like we’re trying to assassinate them and/or bricking lineouts in key positions.
So, just the basics then.
Connacht Rugby: 15. Conor Fitzgerald, 14. John Porch, 13. Byron Ralston, 12. David Hawkshaw, 11. Mack Hansen; 10. Jack Carty (c), 9. Kieran Marmion; 1. Denis Buckley, 2. Dave Heffernan, 3. Finlay Bealham; 4. Gavin Thornbury, 5. Oisin Dowling; 6. Shamus Hurley-Langton, 7. Conor Oliver, 8. Jarrad Butler.
Replacements: 16. Grant Stewart, 17. Peter Dooley, 18. Jack Aungier, 19. Niall Murray, 20. Josh Murphy, 21. Colm Reilly, 22. Tom Daly, 23. Paul Boyle.
To go back to that Connacht game in January for a minute, I’d like to show you this quote.
I wrote it – I’m quoting myself, which is a bit back-slappy – but I think it encapsulates a lot of my thoughts on how you have to approach any game as a selector.
As ever, your pack construction tells you about the game you will end up playing, rather than the game you want to play. In an ideal world, those will be the same.
In the last three rounds, we have given up a lot of size, height and power in the pack against our opposition. This has had the knock-on effect of undercutting key systemic aims of the team game to game.
We want to be a high-possession side but, with a relatively undersized pack, we’re often running into mismatches with smaller back-row players trying to clean out heavier locks and front-row players in key structural areas of the field. That’s no excuse, of course, but it does relate to elements of our ball-carrying rotation.
If you look at our ball-carrying against Zebre – a game where we had 51% possession and 51% territory – you get a good picture of how our forwards have been faring when it comes to getting on and over the gainline. To get a fuller picture of our forward ball carrying, I mapped every single forward carry across the 80 minutes.
The first thing you notice here is a lot of the carrying volume happens in the Middle Zone of the field. This Middle Zone – between the wide 15m tramline east to west and in between the 22s north to south – is a hugely important area of the field for any side but particularly for a side that wants to use more possession and play at a higher tempo for more phases before kicking.
Another thing you’ll notice is that without Jean Kleyn and Gavin Coombes – two high-volume carriers for us, both of whom return this Friday night – a lot of our carrying in this Middle Zone was done by our front five in general and our front row in particular.
This is not something that happens by accident.
Of the 23 ball carries that happened inside this Middle Zone, 60% of them did not get to the gainline. 56% of all the carries in this zone were done by the starting and finishing front row. Only 30% of those front-row carries got on or over the gainline and, of those successful carries from a gainline perspective, one of them was lost to a clean breakdown penalty.
13% of our carries in this zone ended in a clean turnover of possession, which is far from optimal given the importance of that zone to our ability to progress across the field.
In combination with this, our starting and finishing front row made 44 ruck entries throughout the 80 minutes, our locks made 40 ruck entries, and our back row made 42 ruck entries. This, to me, shows a front row that is a little overloaded with primary collision work but, given the players missing through injury and Emerging Ireland, I wonder if this is “making do” with the players we have fit and available.
None of O’Sullivan, O’Donoghue, O’Mahony or Wycherley would be noted ball carriers, especially in this middle zone of the field. Neither would our front row, really, bar Knox but he’s still so new he won’t have a big reputation for one thing or the other as of yet. Our back row only carried five times in this zone so I would expect a much higher output here with Gavin Coombes and Jean Kleyn returning to the starting XV.
Essentially, I think we’ll see a greater balance between Coombes, Kleyn, Kilcoyne, Scannell and Knox with Beirne, O’Mahony and Jack O’Donoghue taking up heavy support roles as they file a little further out into the system.
With more established ball-carrying threats, we should have a greater balance across that middle zone, especially just outside the Connacht 10m line, where I think we’ve struggled to create compressions across the defences in all three games to date.
That has put more ball-carrying pressure on Malakai Fekitoa, in particular, who has carried 10% of all Munster’s carries across the first three games of the season. He’s really good at setting a hard edge around that 15m tramline – he did that really effectively against Zebre – but with more balanced forward carrying and Coombes creating compressions, we could be putting him into space as opposed to asking him to run through walls for us.
If we can get Coombes and Kleyn into the game early and if we can avoid the breakdown and handling errors that have plagued the last three games, there should be lanes for Fekitoa, Campbell, Phillips and Carbery to exploit, especially if we can isolate that Connacht midfield.
