It comes down to this.

Win, and Munster’s journey in this season’s Champions Cup will probably progress beyond the end of January as long as we can find a home win against the Ospreys. Lose and this season, from a European perspective at least, is over.

Big stakes. Big game. It’s time for Big Players to make some Big Moments.

This hasn’t been a vintage season for Munster so far I think it’s fair to say. Injuries, selection disruption and the realities of installing half a coaching group in the last four months was always going to make for a tough 13-week block of games that started and, next week, ends with the Ospreys. There hasn’t been a statement performance from this group as of yet this season. There were flashes in Thomond Park against Racing and in Allianz Park, but nothing close to a complete performance against top grade opposition. Make no mistake, this Racing 92 side are top grade and it’ll take the best performance that we’ve seen from this group since the win in Kingsholm last season to beat them.

Can they do it?

Of course they can.

Munster weren’t a million miles away against a slightly stronger Racing selection in Thomond Park a few months ago but Racing’s ability to disrupt the quality of our lineout possession was a real problem area for us. They were happy enough to put the ball off the field and then attack our throw consistently. We had low-quality output off the lineout for much of the game and disrupted our attempts to get a stable attacking platform to attack Chavancy, Vakatawa and Russell.

Defence has never been a strong part of Finn Russell’s game but the quality of Racings’ contesting meant that we rarely got an opportunity to attack him or the players around him. It wasn’t just the lineouts we lost, it was the ones we just about won but couldn’t launch off.

That took away a lot of opportunities for us, especially as I think the quality of our movements off the lineout have been consistently inventive and they’ll be vital here. We’ll have to do a better job of shaking Racing off our throw.

Keeping Palu trapped at the front of the lineout with Tameifuna will be a good start.

That’ll give us a good shot to shake off Bird, Lauret and Le Roux at Four and Six as long as we vary our targets. Focusing too much on O’Mahony (either as a jumper or lifting target) was an error last time out and Racing had learned to just launch on him to disrupt.

I think getting at Racing’s lineout – really hurting it – is a realistic target for this game. Giving them lineouts for us to attack from their 10m line inwards is a good, low-risk strategy for instead of contestable box kicks.

Essentially, I think we’ll need JJ Hanrahan, Rory Scannell and Chris Farrell to stab the ball low at an angle outside Vakatawa and inside Thomas/Imhoff instead of box kick resetting. Then we attack their throw.

But what’s the key to their lineout?

I noticed in Thomond Park that Racing weren’t really using audible calls to set their lineout into motion. They didn’t use an awful lot of deception through the line either but that wasn’t a surprise; they have a big lineout and they play like it.

So without verbal lineout calls, what were they using to trigger their moves? I was wondering about this for a while but put it out of my head as the game in Thomond went into the rear view mirror. Then, last week, I was watching Racing play Clermont in La Defence and I paused the file to go get a drink.

When I came back, this was the screen in front of me.

Who is Camille Chat looking at?

A lot of hookers eyeball their targets to death before the throw but when I rewound the file, he couldn’t have been eyeing up the guy who he eventually threw the ball too. Here’s the lineout in question.

Le Roux took the ball but unless Chat could see through Tameifuna, he couldn’t see Le Roux snapping up to take this ball.

Then I fast-forwarded to the next marked lineout in my list and there was Chat eyeballing again.

No visible trigger and a clean two-second throw to Le Roux at Four.

What is Chat looking at?

It wasn’t until they got a lineout later in the game on the other side of the pitch that I got a look at what a Racing hooker might be eyeballing off to his hard left or hard right depending on the direction of play.

It’s Chouzenoux in the black scrum cap, right?

No, it isn’t, because he moves into the line right after this screengrab and doesn’t give a visual trigger to throw.

Look at the entire sequence and see what you notice about the key player in this scheme.

The key movement for the throw isn’t Chouzenoux, it’s Donnacha Ryan. And who can Baubigny see the entire time?

Donnacha Ryan. And when you look at the lineout, Donnacha Ryan is out of line with the other players in the scheme.

So I went back and looked at all the other full lineouts that Racing had in this game and then I went back and looked at the Munster game. Have a look at the player “out of line” in all of these lineouts. There’s a lot, so stick with it.

Not only does the out of line player’s initial movement seem to trigger the throw but they also have a key involvement in the lineout as either a lifter or a jumper.

Even when the distance between the out of line player and the jump target is pronounced, the formula remains the same. Bird runs all the way to lift Chouzenoux on this scheme.

They run a different scheme on shortened lineouts – they seem to time those on the hooker – but when they have 6+ numbers in the lineout, the out of line player was a key guide to their lifting target in all but one of the lineouts they ran against ASM.

Is it worth Munster spotting the out of line player once they settle into their scheme and then marking that player until he interacts with the line? I think so. If it pays off, we can scrag Racing’s throw, disrupt their chain of possession to Russell and Vakatawa (look at this attack on the second phase after a lineout), force a few errors out of them and get them kicking back to us on our terms, rather than consistently on theirs.

It’ll be hard, really hard, but it’s a way into the game.