[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]T[/su_dropcap]here’s nothing better than spite on a rugby field. The last few weeks and months have seen a flurry of that toe-curling #respect stuff on social media after games. You’re telling me that Stuart Hogg and Finn Russell, who’ve known each other for years, can share a beer after a game despite being on different teams?
That’s rugby. That’s #respect 🍻
Fuck that.
Give me simmering grudges that span generations and that are barely contained by the four white lines once or twice a season. Give me clapping fellas off the field through gritted teeth when they’d much prefer to be clouting them around the head and neck instead. I have an uncle – a tighthead prop – who despises the loosehead prop he played against regularly back in the day and that was 30 years ago. I have a man who’d I only describe as an enemy after the shit we did to each other on a rugby pitch six or seven years ago over in Italy. We won’t ever be sharing a pint after a game (especially now that I’m a broken down lunatic) and you can take that to the bank.
My point is, I’m sick to death of hearing about how much #respect rugby teams have for each other because it feels fake to me. It feels performative. I’m much more into the teams that have a genuine animosity for each other and who have no bother at all showing it, like Munster and Glasgow.
I love and hate this fixture.
Munster were 14 points down with 15 minutes left against Glasgow in Thomond Park.
We managed to pull it back to a two point game when Peter O’Mahony won a breakdown penalty just inside the Glasgow half.
Up steps Rory Scannell with the clock going red… #SUAF #BADGUYLTD pic.twitter.com/Bnj8xWWD03
— Three Red Kings (@threeredkings) April 25, 2020
It’s as simple and as binary as I love beating Glasgow and despise losing to them. I do not think that I’m alone in that. The last two times we’ve travelled to Scotstoun we’ve been at the pointy end of stinging defeats. In September 2017, we were beaten out the gate 37-10. In September 2018, we did slightly better but still lost 25-10. If you look at our two seasons as Glasgow’s chief in-conference rivals, those early season defeats were a key component in our eventual route to semi-final defeats in the RDS.
We haven’t played Glasgow in Glasgow since and a fair bit has changed for the Warriors in the intervening 18 months. Dave Rennie has taken over the Wallabies, Finn Russell, Johnny Gray and Stuart Hogg have departed for France and England respectively and I think it’s fair to say that the test window Warriors we’re facing this time around are a different beast than years gone by.
Glasgow Warriors: 15. Glenn Brice; 14. Tommy Seymour, 13. Nick Grigg, 12. Robbie Fergusson, 11. Robbie Nairn; 10. Pete Horne, 9. Sean Kennedy; 1. Aki Seiuli, 2. Grant Stewart, 3. Enrique Pieretto, 4. Lewis Bean, 5. Rob Harley, 6. Ryan Wilson (c), 7. Tom Gordon, 8. TJ Ioane
Replacements: 16. Johnny Matthews, 17. Alex Allan, 18. D’Arcy Rae, 19. Hamish Bain, 20. Fotu Lokotui, 21. Caleb Korteweg, 22. Brandon Thomson, 23. Niko Matawalu
That doesn’t mean they’re worse, it just means they are at a different stage of development than what you might consider Glasgow’s peak years from 2015 to 2019.
It’s quite challenging to lose world-class talent like Russell, Gray and Hogg over successive seasons and it was no surprise to see them taper off a bit in the aftermath of their loss to Leinster in the 2018/19 PRO14 final. But this season, they’ve also lost key squad depth guys like DTH Van Der Merwe, Callum Gibbins, Tim Swinson, Nick Frisby, Ruadhri Jackson, Rory Hughes and Adam Ashe. On the plus side, they managed to retain Leone Nakarawa and bring Richie Gray back to the club along with a smart loan deal for TJ Ioane but I think it would be fair to say that Glasgow are hurting during this extended test window with their hefty international commitments to Scotland combined with a net loss of squad depth since the pandemic.
Glasgow with all their internationals back are a different proposition but their heavy losses over the last few weeks to Leinster and Ulster have been influenced by their international commitments coupled with key injuries to Richie Gray, Leone Nakarawa and others.
For Munster, the recipe for a win here is exploiting this depletion, something that Glasgow’s head coach Danny Wilson alluded to earlier this week.
“We always go in with the mindset of trying to win. We know we go into a lot of these games as depleted underdogs, but that doesn’t mean we think it’s acceptable to lose. Attitude is the most important thing.”
When a head coach is talking like that, you pile on the pressure and when a team is depleted, that pressure is in the winning and losing of forward collisions. When I watched Glasgow’s recent two games against Ulster and Leinster, nothing really stood out to me as being all that negative about the Warriors’ performances except in the collision winning part of the game.
It wasn’t that one guy was getting steamrolled in contact, or that Leinster/Ulster were making 10m per carry but on the whole, over the course of a full attacking sequence, more often than not you saw Glasgow losing numbers and spacing in the middle of the field.
Have a look at this example here and watch how Leinster roll across Glasgow’s forward defensive line. What we’re looking for here is isolated forwards being “chopped out” by Leinster’s forward pressure.
In practicality, this means that the ruck before the current contact point becomes incrementally more important. Why? Because the defenders involved in the last ruck have to become the fringe defence of the next ruck and if they can’t get across in time, space begins to appear and become preserved on the outside shoulder of the attack.
The key ruck in the above came right at the end when Glasgow lost four-plus forwards to the collision point – when Leinster recycled, Byrne had space to attack and he made an excellent play to set up a score.
When you see a defence losing two-plus players to collision points on the feet and the floor, that space will be preserved if the defence can’t get a dominant stop on the flow of possession. The pass from Molony out of the pod to Byrne made this opportunity but he was playing to space preserved by dominant Leinster collisions.
That space was preserved when Leinster cut back inside. The more dominant your consecutive collisions, the more space you preserve on the outside shoulder in central areas. Look at how outside space is preserved on this phase progression across the field.
Leinster rolled across the face of the Glasgow defence from wide to centre and created attacking opportunities as a result of dominant collision wins.
Watch this sequence to spot the exact same thing;
The onus will be on Munster to produce the same kind of physical performance as we roll across the face of Glasgow’s forward line on Monday night. If we can produce that kind of physicality across the first two-thirds of this game, we’ll win and could even win quite well. If not, the game will be tight and could go either way.
The back row we’ve selected for this one looks like a nod to the tight power that we’re going to try to wield over Glasgow. The Warriors were hopeful that they could bring Richie Gray back into the squad for this one but, at the time of writing, he appears to have not recovered from his concussion to start.
For Munster, the way to win here is clear – beat ’em up.
