[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]M[/su_dropcap]ake no mistake about it, this is the biggest game of the PRO14 season to date. Munster currently hold an 8 point lead atop Conference B ahead of Connacht and a win here in the Sportsground would stretch to at least an 11 point, two bonus-point win lead that, if it’s preserved over the two rescheduled games, could lead to Munster qualifying for a PRO14 final by the 27th of February at the earliest.
But that’s if Munster win and, as you might imagine, that’s far from a formality.
Connacht have been in a strange place this season and none so strange as their last seven games, where they’ve won three and lost four, with three of those four losses coming at home to the Scarlets, Bristol and Ulster just two weeks ago. And yet. That win in the RDS has, rightly, changed the conversation around Connacht in a hurry. Whoever managed to beat Leinster for the first time in two seasons in the PRO14 was always going to take on some of their collective aurae. That would be somewhat mitigated if Leinster lost their streak during a November test window on a wet Friday in Cardiff with a heavily rotated selection but this was a team that started with Johnny Sexton and had a number of experienced players in the mix like Dan Leavy, Devin Toner, Ross Molony, Dave Kearney, James Tracey, Ed Byrne, Jack Conan, Michael Bent and Rory O’Loughlin alongside hot prospect young players like Ryan Baird, Jimmy O’Brien and Scott Penny. Sure, there was some COVID and injury disruption but Leinster’s entire winning streak in this competition was built on teams with fewer top-line players in it than this one winning, winning and winning again.
And Connacht beat them in the RDS.
Sure, Leinster had a lot of issues in that game – and I’ll look at those later – but rugby is a game where you keep what you kill. Wins against sides who don’t tend to lose are inherently more valuable because they are rare.
When Munster became the first non-French side to beat Clermont in Clermont, that meant something and imparted something intangible to the group beyond four match points. The same is true for Connacht after their win over Leinster in the RDS. It meant something. And they will roll into this game thinking that, if they can beat Leinster in the RDS, then there isn’t anything they can’t do.
Connacht: 15. John Porch, 14. Ben O’Donnell, 13. Sammy Arnold, 12. Tom Daly, 11. Alex Wootton; 10. Jack Carty, 9. Caolin Blade; 1. Denis Buckley, 2. Shane Delahunt, 3. Finlay Bealham, 4. Ultan Dillane, 5. Quinn Roux (c), 6. Sean O’Brien, 7. Conor Oliver, 8. Sean Masterson
Replacements: 16. Dave Heffernan, 17. Matthew Burke, 18. Dominic Robertson-McCoy, 19. Gavin Thornbury, 20. Paul Boyle, 21. Kieran Marmion, 22. Diarmuid Kilgallen, 23. Peter Sullivan
We can’t talk about this Connacht game without talking about last week’s win over Leinster.
It was a great night for the province built on good defence and, importantly, excellent territorial management in the first half. Connacht would have expected Leinster to have the lion’s share of possession in this game and built much of their tactical approach around it. When you expect to struggle with possession, build a game around smart kicking. Connacht kicked from hand an average of 23 times per game in the PRO14 before last weekend’s game. In this game, Connacht kicked 30 times from hand, with Jack Carty taking the bulk of these. If we look at the first half, Leinster had 53% of the possession but only 39% of the territory. This ties directly into Connacht’s 20-5 first-half scoreboard. Leinster had more of the ball but played with the ball in disadvantageous areas of the field.
Take this sequence, for example. Leinster had won a free-kick off the back of a pretty dominant looking scrum and Dan Leavy, looking to make an impact, tapped and went quickly to inject a bit of “front foot” into the game. Sexton spread the ball wide – what choice did he have – but Leinster’s pass accuracy was uncharacteristically poor, which lead to a wide scramble for possession.
That lead directly to a scrappy box kick exit from McGrath – a weakness in his game over the last season or so – which gifted Connacht a lineout inside the Leinster 22. From that position, Connacht found some passive midfield defence off a maul feint and managed to pressure Leinster at close range before Shane Delahunt knocked the ball on.
From that knock-on, Leinster won a scrum penalty, lost the resulting lineout to a knock-on, won a freekick before quick tapping again. From there, well, just have a look;
Both sides traded transitions until Jack Carty snatched a looping Ross Molony pass out of the air for a clean intercept try. There was an air of “all or nothing” about that Molony pass. If Carty decides to stick and drift instead of attacking the lane between Toner and the pass target, we’d probably be talking about how multi-skilled the Leinster forwards are for setting up a 3-2 isolation down the tramlines.
Instead, Connacht took a 7-0 lead.
Straight from the restart, Sexton kicked to Blade who found Carty for an outstanding exit that pinned Sexton to the near touchline, took away any openside transition plays and ran the ball back into the teeth of the Connacht defence, forcing a turnover.
This was another little win for Connacht. From that lineout, I think Jack Carty demonstrated the disparity in approach between the two sides quite starkly. Connacht retained the ball from the lineout and even though they lost ground on the possession, Carty’s excellent kick downfield was the perfect tactical decision.
Leinster ran the ball back – again, into the teeth of the Connacht transition defence – and were hemmed into a negative position inside their own 10m line.
McGrath eventually worked possession into an exit position but his box kick – and the Leinster chase – was quite poor. Connacht took the ball on the Leinster 10m line and earned a penalty a few phases later, which they missed, but it showed the effectiveness of their approach. Kick long, pressure the receipt to kill the transition, step on the gas with the line speed in the opponent’s territory to keep them from getting outside and then wait for the kick return.
Leinster cottoned onto this after the first 10 minutes and started to change tack. This was a long kicking duel that Connacht eventually came out on top of but they had the patience to stick to the plan.
Leinster would have liked for Connacht to start tearing back on 50/50 kick transition counter-attack but they held their nerve, scrambled on Leinster’s attempt to break out of defence. When the opportunity came for Carty to make a play with the boot at the end, Carty found space in behind the fullback and earned an average exit for a big territorial win.
When Connacht needed to muscle up on the kick transition breakdown defence, they did that too. It’s based on the same principle – exit long down the field whenever you run into a wall, get your defence up in transition and, in this instance, attack the breakdown when Leinster overextend on the cleanout.
Everywhere you look in that first half, you see Connacht kicking long, pressurising the return in contact and at the breakdown and the scrum position that lead to Wootton’s try before halftime came from a combination of all three factors – kick pressure, breakdown pressure and then aggressive line speed when the opposition is deep in their own half.
I would expect Connacht to use a similar approach in this weekend’s game but the context of the opposition is different. Kick to pressure, hit the reset phases, wait for the kickback and launch hard off the set-piece could work against Leinster – and it did work in the first half in a similar way that Munster’s approach in the PRO14 semi-final a few months ago did – but Munster have a different array of threats than last week’s Leinster selection.
Our backfield management and defensive kicking game will be vitally important. Connacht will look to kick over the top of our defensive line a few times to try and unsettle Haley, who is comfortable defending the deep spaces and has shown over and over again that he’s comfortably the best defensive fullback on the island. He’ll be needed here.
I think we’ve also got the ability to limit the scope of Carty’s kicking game by (1) kicking smartly and chasing effectively off Murray’s box kick exits and (2) pressuring the Connacht lineout so their sequence of kick > pressure > wait for the kick to touch > launch > kick again until you recover possession within striking distance of the 22 where you can launch a scoring sequence doesn’t have the opportunity to get rolling as regularly as it did in the first half of the Leinster game.
In the second half of that contest, Leinster began to project themselves more forcefully in the central areas of the field and it produced immediate results. There’s a template there for Munster to rotate through our heavy ball carriers in the narrow areas before compressing and isolating Daly/Arnold on our phase play release to De Allende/Farrell.
I think there’s also a real opportunity for Munster to exert a lot of pressure at the scrum for the full 80 minutes and seriously pressure Connacht’s pack selection in the maul.
