That this is round 9 of the URC but only Munster’s 6th game of the regular season will go some way to illustrating how badly COVID19 featuring Omicron & Friends has duffed up Munster’s season. You all know what happened in South Africa and the disruption it caused to the point that over a month later and we’re still ironing out the kinks, but that’s got to be in the rearview mirror now. Bank the immunity, such as it is, and roll on because there’s a lot of rugby coming up, one way or the other.
It hopefully starts this weekend against Connacht, a side that has been defined in recent years by the kind of spite traditionally reserved for Leinster games in the early 2010s. That’s a testament to Connacht’s rise in the aftermath of the few down seasons they had in the aftermath of their PRO12 win in 2015/16. Normally when you don’t win, there isn’t a rivalry but Connacht buck that trend against Munster. They may only have won one of the last five games between us but most of those games have been close, incident-packed and usually only settled in the last quarter or, as of late, in the last five minutes.
I can’t help but feel this weekend will be no different.
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Connacht’s results have fluctuated quite a bit this season in the URC – four losses and three wins – but they don’t have the press of team with that kind of up and down record.
Style of play has a lot to do with that, as does the generally lower expectations levied on Connacht by pundits and the media in general. Connacht score some nice tries and play a game that is more reliant on long, transition generating kicks off #10 as opposed to the box kick (boo, hiss) so that goes a long way to glossing over their poor performances in Cardiff, at home to Dragons and then away to Leinster. That game against Leinster in the RDS seemed particularly deflating given the scale of the defeat relative to the expectation around Connacht before kick-off.
Then there was that game against Munster.
That game.
Munster didn’t play well – something that often happens against sides who play a version of kick pressure, as Connacht do – but even then, the tries conceded in that game came from a badly defended 5m tap and a charge down. Go back to the Rainbow Cup defeat in Thomond Park and two of the tries conceded came from a blown restart and catastrophic handling error in the middle of the field. Go back to the earlier that season in Thomond Park and Munster’s implosion at the lineout kept Connacht in the game through the contest.
It has been a constant that when Munster lose to Connacht or look like losing to Connacht in the recent past, it is off the back of a litany of errors (forced and unforced) throughout the flow of the game. When Munster don’t commit those errors, the scoreline becomes relatively comfortable in our favour. If Munster want to win in the Sportsground, that just cannot happen. How we choose to play and who we select to play directly relates to those errors.
Connacht Rugby: 15. Tiernan O’Halloran, 14. John Porch, 13. Sam Arnold, 12. Bundee Aki, 11. Mack Hansen, 10. Jack Carty (c), 9. Kieran Marmion, 1. Matthew Burke, 2. Dave Heffernan, 3. Finlay Bealham, 4. Ultan Dillane, 5. Oisín Dowling, 6. Cian Prendergast, 7. Conor Oliver, 8. Jarrad Butler
Replacements: 16. Shane Delahunt, 17. Tietie Tuimauga, 18. Dominic Robertson-McCoy, 19. Eoghan Masterson, 20. Abraham Papali’i, 21. Matthew Devine, 22. Conor Fitzgerald, 23. Tom Farrell
To understand how to beat Connacht, you have to understand what they do on the field and why they do it.
Connacht play a form of kick pressure that is different to what, say, Castres or the Springboks do but it operates on similar principles and with a deep understanding of what they are and are not good at. Andy Friend has a middleweight pack at his disposal. This is a side effect of Connacht’s budget. Elite size and power across a range of positions cost money that Connacht don’t have. In the last off-season, they lost Quinn Roux to Toulon, a team who know the value of a big tighthead lock with the funds to match. This coming off-season they will lose Dillane, who wouldn’t be in the same power bracket as Roux, but is a big enough hitter all the same.
As a result, they have to take “risks” such as they are by signing guys like Abraham Papali’i, Leva Fifita and Tietie Tuimauga who have had mixed success across the last two seasons with Tuimauga signed most recently from Manawatu in the Mitre10 competition down in New Zealand. This is the kind of clever boxing that Connacht have to do in the market as they experience it and they have more hits than misses.
For the most part, though, Connacht have to play a style of rugby that suits what they have. They know that grinding through the phases isn’t realistic at the elite level for them. Sure, they can go through the phases from 5m out in context but most teams can. Connacht know they have to play differently to be successful, so they do. The only reliable way to play around a size differential is to kick the ball. You can box kick it – the short ball contestable – or you can drive long and chase but one way or another, you will be surrounding possession for a purpose.
In phase attack, Connacht have two distinct states – the phases post kick and the phases pre-kick. When you watch Connacht in possession as much as I have over the last two weeks, you can almost feel when they’re going to drop deep to kick long through Carty. Why do they kick with such distance?
Connacht do this to shake up the opposition defence on long transition sequences and, in Jack Carty, they have a guy who’s as good and as sharp a long kicker as there is in Europe. Connacht don’t want to get into a slugfest between the 10m lines. They want to play with flow and momentum and when you have a middleweight pack, you want to do that against a misaligned defence. There’s no better way to get a defence misaligned than by engaging in long kicking duels.
Kicking long back to Connacht is exactly what they want from these situations. They have kickers who will stress your backfield positioning and punish any kicking errors or you “bailing out” into touch, which plays into Connacht’s other preferred state – launching off the lineout. Connacht often use kicking duels to advance up the field into striking range off the lineout when the opposition go to touch. Carty, in particular, is great at “winning” these duels by getting great length off his kicks – essentially out-kicking his opposition.
When you bail out into touch – usually many metres ahead of where Connacht initially kicked from – they are a really dangerous lineout side.
Connacht are really efficient at finding screened runners off Carty or Aki to go through or around compressions if you overfocus on Aki. They have a nice system of slides and screens that they use off the lineout and scrum.
So how do you approach them?
From a kicking perspective, you’ve got to balance trading kicks with them with running the ball back and engaging them in heavy phase play. Connacht’s kicking game has a spiky underbelly – if you run back too directly, they will swarm the first transition ruck with jackals like Oliver, Arnold, Butler and Aki. They are very capable of winning penalties in those sequences.
We can’t really afford to get into extended kicking duels with Carty, Porch and Hansen either. Carty is great at finding deep kicks and clever angles and our work on transition hasn’t been good enough to the point where we’re likely to slice them open on the kick return. We might well do that but I just haven’t seen the evidence of it consistently.
We might be better off putting backfield resources into monopolising the ball on kick return i.e. setting a conservative target on the run back and going into phase possession to start stressing Connacht’s collision winning ability over time with a view to kicking deep on our terms to earn lineouts from Connacht, not kicking on their terms during kicking duels.
At the set piece, I think you can make an error in being too focused on stopping Connacht at the source. If you can make the scrum difficult for them – as Leicester and Leinster did – you take a lot of Connacht’s striking ability away from them but for Munster, that often means going for a Support Forward build in the front row – our most aggressive technical scrummagers are Support Forwards in roleset – when we need physical bullies to punish Connacht when they are defending. That would be Archer and Knox, for me, especially if Salanoa isn’t fit.
Realistically, is Chris Busby going to whistle the Connacht scrum off the field? I mean, probably not. That happened against Tigers and it’ll certainly be a target for Munster as a result, but we have to balance that with needs elsewhere. The lineout is the same. I’m not sure there’s a lot of value in selecting a back five designed to go after Connacht in the air so that double Combo Flanker system we’ve used at times this season isn’t suitable. I’d go Combo Flanker, Small Forward, Power Forward in the back row with as much heft as possible in the second row.
I think you’re nearly better off giving Connacht most of the lineout ball they want outside of our 10m line, punishing them on their maul setups and then using De Allende and Farrell to match up with their screen generating midfield and covering the screens. There are intercepts to be had against Connacht in the first two phases after the launch if they aren’t kicking, so we’ll need to be aware of those, and the risks that come with chasing after them.
