At a fundamental level, Leinster – players, coaches and staff – do not rate Munster as we are currently constructed. Not even a little bit. Forget everything that will be said about Munster by Leo Cullen this week or in the weeks to come should we play them again. To Leo Cullen and Stuart Lancaster, we are Connacht+.
Believe that, because they do.
The team they have selected here is not one that they fully expect to beat a full-strength Munster side but they would be pretty confident that the addition of one or two key players in key areas would be enough to tip the balance back in their favour. That is how confident they are that they have the exact measure of us, down to the picogram.
With their business in the URC already achieved – they can only finish first regardless of what happens this weekend – Cullen and Lancaster have rotated their team around accordingly. That is only to be expected, given their workload over the next two months.
Next weekend, it will be Leinster vs La Rochelle in the Heineken Cup final. That will be an all hands on deck game and Leinster would be loathed to use anyone this week that they have schemed to be a key component in a win over La Rochelle. Forget about the narratives that Leinster are sure to beat La Rochelle in the same way that they did to Toulouse – the context is wildly different and Leinster’s coaching team is well aware of that.
The week after that season, and perhaps era, defining final it’ll be a home URC quarter-final against a fresh opponent who’ll have spent two weeks prepping for Leinster and Leinster alone. The week after that – should Leinster progress – they’ll likely have another high-intensity semi-final against, most likely, one of the big South African sides. Should they win that game, the final will be a week later and, two weeks after that game, Ireland will play their first test against the All Blacks in Eden Park with a lot of Leinster players likely to make up the matchday squad, if not the bulk of the starting fifteen.
Essentially, there will be a test match every week until the 16th of July including two mid-week tests against the Maori All Blacks.
Seven weeks. Six games.
That one week “off” will be spent making the long trek down to the Land of the Long White Cloud. None of these games will be cakewalks and top players can only play so many minutes before injuries start to pile up. Leinster expect to play – and win – all of those knockout games and they need their best players to do that. They also don’t want critical guys to pick up medium to long term injuries in New Zealand against a fresh All Blacks side with scores to settle and slates to wipe clean.
Something has to give and this week was the only match weekend where a loss would not be the end of a line. That doesn’t mean that Leinster will lose this game, of course, but it does mean that it is one where they are comfortable rotating down-chart players in as required.
If you look at how Leinster have been using their forward replacements in the last two Heineken Cup games, they’ve gone for Ruddock as a 10-minute cover guy for the back row, Joe McCarthy as a five minute “game over” minute builder with the result secured, Ronan Kelleher and Dan Sheehan as 45/35 hitters, Furlong as a 60-minute guy (when not injured) with Ala’alatoa and Porter doing 60/20 with Healy when Leinster are comfortable physically and 60+/finish when they’re concerned about the opposition’s size.
If the same holds true for La Rochelle as it did against Toulouse – and I think it will – I don’t see Leinster risking too many of that 13 man equation here, at least not for long enough to expose them to a game sheet ruining injury that could blow an entire season. A lot is made about how good Leinster’s depth is but most of their top-end performances are driven by six core players.
For me, they are; Andrew Porter, Ronan Kelleher, Tadhg Furlong, Dan Sheehan, Johnny Sexton and Robbie Henshaw.
Everyone else is, to a degree, relatively interchangeable. This isn’t a value judgement on superb, top-tier players like Doris, Ringrose or Van Der Flier – it’s just that I think players like that aren’t why Leinster win, they are how Leinster win. That Big Six are why Leinster win big games, certainly this season, and that’s the big difference.
When you see a Leinster side with any of these core six players either starting or on the bench, it is a game that Leinster are targeting in one form or another. If none of those players is present, it’s a game that Leinster have schemed out as being either (a) one they can afford to lose with the benefit gained of having players available for other, more important games or (b) one they feel they can win even without that Big Six.
When Leinster have lost in the URC this season, it has always been with two or fewer of the Big Six in the matchday squad.
- Ulster (h) – Robbie Henshaw and Tadhg Furlong
- Ulster (a) – No Big Six player present
- Cardiff (a) – No Big Six player present
- Sharks (a) – Andrew Porter.
- Stormers (a) – No Big Six player present
The biggest outlier there would probably be the home defeat against Ulster where they started Furlong and Henshaw. Every other game they’ve lost was either without that core group of players, or just one in the case of Porter against the Sharks. Much was made of how rotated Leinster were the last time they played Munster – Black Saturday – but even then they had three of that Big Six in the squad of 23 along with a first-choice back row, midfield and back three.
Make no mistake, that was a game Leinster targeted with the idea that they were always going to rotate heavily for the South African tour and it paid off massively. They risked a few slots, selection wise, in that game for sure. The starting front five while Porter and Kelleher were still injured and Ryan’s concussion situation was unclear was a risk but they had the calvary in place if things turned sour in the first half. Without Beirne, Kleyn and Coombes (thanks to an early injury) and with a brutally poor, soft, passive performance, Leinster earned a bonus-point win, denied us a losing bonus point and beat us out the gate, if we’re being honest.
For me, I think we need all of our current Big Six – Kleyn, Beirne, Snyman, O’Mahony, Coombes and De Allende – to take on Leinster on a like for like basis. We started with three and finished the game with two.
If Leinster weren’t targeting that game and, for example, left out Henshaw, Furlong and Sheehan and, say, just one of the starting back row as a force multiplier they might well have lost that game. If that fixture finishes 4-0 to Munster from a match point POV, as opposed to 5-0 Leinster and everything that’s happened since stayed exactly the same, we’d be top of the table with 60 points, Leinster would be second on 57 points and would have to go big this week – with all the risks that come with that for the Heineken Cup final – to avoid slipping to fourth or fifth and travelling to Durban for a quarter-final the week after the Heineken Cup final. But they were targeting the game. Their selection showed that and they got exactly what they want, albeit a good bit easier than even they expected.
Ifs and buts, eh?
Nothing Leinster do is by accident. Every selection of their Big Six in the regular season is for a specific purpose and they rarely, if ever, fall short when they do so.
When that Big Six aren’t in the squad – either in full or in part – you have to beat them. If you don’t, you’ll have to choke down every lump you’ve got coming to you and, for Munster this week, that’s a lot of potential lumps.
Leinster Rugby: 15. Jordan Larmour, 14. Rob Russell, 13. Jamie Osbourne, 12. Ciarán Frawley, 11. Rory O’Loughlin, 10. Harry Byrne, 9. Cormac Foley, 1. Ed Byrne (c), 2. Seán Cronin, 3. Thomas Clarkson, 4. Joe McCarthy, 5. Josh Murphy, 6. Ryan Baird, 7. Scott Penny, 8. Max Deegan
Replacements: 16. John McKee, 17. Peter Dooley, 18. Cian Healy, 19. Devin Toner, 20. Alex Soroka, 21. Ben Murphy, 22. David Hawkshaw, 23. Adam Byrne
It’s not an exaggeration to say that the entire season hangs on this game.
Lose, and we could find ourselves with a nightmare trip to South Africa in just seven days’ time for a quarter-final. Win – and win well – and we will have at least two playoff games at home if we can win our quarter-final. The stakes are high, but they almost always are at this stage of the season and no one wants to be talking about “needing a response” in two weeks’ time.
When it comes to the last round of the regular season and the transition to playoff rugby one of the biggest enemies is attrition. The “next man up” cliche that every team likes to use these days is the modern equivalent of “’tis but a scratch”. There are some players that, unless the next man up is also a world-class or system-powering player, you simply cannot afford to lose. Pretending otherwise is a mix of delusion, hubris and whistling past the graveyard. Keeping your top guys on the field and as fresh as possible relative to your schedule is a key part of winning trophies.
Next Man Up is a nice thought but quality is quality for a reason. Leinster are often seen to be the kings of Next Man Upology and, to be fair, you can see why. They tend to win a lot during the regular season with their near trademark mix of young talent, established “on the test bubble” senior players in the 0-20 test cap/100-200 provincial cap range, highly experienced former test guys and then a smattering of their Category A elite level current internationals when available or when the situation requires.
The entire system is self-sustaining because the young talent either evolves into the Category A elite level players, the “bubble” players, or they wash out. A large chunk of that Category A elite level players age out to be the hugely experienced former test guys if and when they get displaced from that level and then the next group of young players start the process all over again with the centrally contracted players of the day bankrolling the depth because very little of the process above is cheap.
If the raw materials coming in at the bottom stay at the same level – something that’s easy to take for granted, actually – then the performance levels will generally stay the same as the seasons stack on top of each other, bar a raft of career-altering injuries to Core or Foundational players, unexpected coaching disruption, unexpected financial disruption or a mixture of all three.
The focus often goes on the young players when people talk about Leinster but the middle layer of depth – Ross Molony, Sean Cronin, Rhys Ruddock, Devin Toner, Ross Byrne, Luke McGrath – is clearly more important. Guys like Tadhg Furlong, Andrew Porter, Ronan Kelleher, Josh Van Der Flier, Caelan Doris, James Lowe, Robbie Henshaw, Garry Ringrose and James Ryan only ever play five or six regular-season games for Leinster every year so the bulk of the campaign has to be driven by those stalwarts.
Because of Leinster’s top-down cohesion, there isn’t much difference between what Ireland does during the November internationals and Six Nations, what Champions Cup & Big Game Leinster do and what Regular Season Leinster do. The principles of their game scale up and down as required with adjustments relative to how they feel they stack up to the opposition on any given weekend. Most of what I discussed in the Red Eye from a few weeks ago still applies, even against a rotated Leinster selection but if, as here, they expect to give up more size/experience/power than they’d like, Lancaster will tweak their game accordingly.
That tweaking mostly revolves around their kicking game.
Against Toulouse, a lot was made about Leinster’s ability to move Toulouse around the field with phase play but, for me, their kicking game was a key factor – almost the key factor. At their core, Leinster are a counter-counter transition team and when they give up size/power, they extend their kicking game.
A counter-counter transition team generally likes to kick long with the idea of reacting to the reaction of the opposition to that long kickback; be it hitting them hard on a kick transition to force a turnover or taking the opposition’s kick and transitioning to attack that. Leinster’s long kicking game takes out a lot of short-range aerial contests on their own ball, which can be unpredictable, and replaces it with a longer game that can be drilled and trained for. This isn’t necessarily an off-ball game but it can be moved to that if Leinster are missing the core players that make their attack run at the level they want it to. They don’t have any of their Big Six playing here, so I would expect Leinster to kick long, early, to generate as many counter-counter transition opportunities as possible.
In the Heineken Cup semi-final, for example, Leinster kicked far more than Toulouse but also far longer than Toulouse. Toulouse kicked 615 metres on 21 kicks and Leinster kicked 1004m on 29 kicks which is almost 5m longer per kick on average.
Toulouse typically outkick their opponent when it comes to distance – they did against Munster and Ulster in the Heineken Cup – but they didn’t do it last weekend. Why? I think it comes down to freshness. Playing a counter-counter transition game requires a lot of cardio and a lot of freshness, especially in your pack. Plenty of teams who think they have the fitness to play that counter-counter transition game actually don’t and they don’t have the engines of quick ball that Leinster do, either. Leinster’s counter-counter transition game often sees them rack up big ball in play minutes but, crucially, with the quick ball engines of Porter/Kelleher/Furlong to create radiating opportunities deep into an attacking sequence.
You’ll often see Leinster striking hard off the set-piece – lineout/scrum – but they treat their kicking game as if it’s another set piece that can be drilled and schemed for, even when they don’t have the ball.
The only side who kick longer than Leinster in the URC, on the whole, are the Sharks – coached by Noel McNamara, ironically enough.
When you break it down even further, the only sides in the top four with an average metre per kick distance of 32m or higher are Leinster and the Sharks. The Lions – top of the rankings with 35.5m per kick – play their home games at altitude so you’d expect them to have a longer kicking game. Glasgow are next and no surprise there either as they are trying to emulate Leinster’s style. Zebre, rock bottom of the league, are third and then you have Leinster, the league leaders, and the Sharks currently joint second on points with Munster and the Stormers.
- Emirate Lions – 35.5m per kick
- Glasgow – 34.4m per kick on average
- Zebre – 34.3m per kick on average
- Leinster – 33.5m per kick on average
- Sharks – 32m per kick on average
- Ospreys – 32m per kick on average
- Benetton – 31.6m per kick on average
- Edinburgh – 31.5m per kick on average
- Bulls – 31.4 per kick on average
- Munster – 30m per kick on average
- Ulster – 29.4m per kick on average
For this game, I would expect Leinster to really double down on their longer kicking game and use Byrne and Frawley to extend their attacking lines on the return from Munster, should we choose to kick short and contestably, which we probably will. A lot will hinge on Russell, Larmour, Osbourne and O’Loughlin in these moments as their control of the high ball and Leinster’s ruck security after the high ball will be crucial. If Munster can disrupt that and force Leinster to play more ball without their elite quick ball engines, they will look as “mortal” as anyone else. This is where Munster’s work in defence and at the breakdown will be critical in taking Leinster off their primary game. Do that, and we’ll win well if we can take our opportunities. Show up passive and sloppy like a few weeks ago and Connacht+ will never be more apt.
This is a big one.
