The Schedule

URC Post Round 3

By Tom Savage8 min read

Before the season started, I put together two Schedule articles (here and here) where I went over the way that teams structure their seasons with a view to maximising their playing resources while getting as many points as possible to achieve whatever aims are expected of them.

The URC has an 18-game regular season, and that means that league games are far more valuable than, say, in the TOP14, which has a 26-game regular season. Those extra six league games in France make the league more gruelling, yes, but it also leaves you more wiggle room on a game-to-game basis, and it’s largely why French teams are very comfortable rotating heavily when they go away from home, outside a few games where necessity might force them to go strong.

The TOP14 and the URC look similar from a distance — both are domestic leagues feeding into Europe with play-offs at the end — but they reward different behaviours. A 26-game TOP14 season is a marathon of depth and attrition. An 18-game URC season is something of a sprint, in between long test and European blocks in between November and April, where bonus-point engineering and block planning can decide your seeding.

Length and Volatility
The TOP14’s 26 rounds allow regression to the mean; one bad month rarely ruins a campaign, and even a bad spell across two months is rarely fatal. The URC’s 18 rounds are far less forgiving, especially when you factor in the touring aspect that affects every team differently. Every slip moves you on the ladder, and early point-banking has outsized value, as we learned repeatedly over the last three seasons in particular.

In France, the top two earn a bye and watch 3–6 knock each other around in the barrages. As such, your entire season can be designed around that bye. In the URC, eight qualify straight into quarter-finals; the premium is on securing a home QF, which usually falls around the 60/65-point mark.

Relegation Pressure
The TOP14’s relegation trapdoor (with a play-off for 13th) makes drags mid-table away games into full-on nasty work, especially after Christmas. Desperate teams chase defensive bonus points and deny try bonuses. The URC has no relegation and a different try bonus point system, so late-season behaviour trends towards rotation around Europe and international windows rather than survival mode.

Those bonus point rules matter. In the TOP14, you only get a try bonus if you score at least three more tries than the opponent; so it’s almost completely opponent-dependent and therefore much harder to script in advance. In the URC, four tries — regardless of the opposition’s tally — bank the bonus. That makes targeted TBP “harvest” games at home a viable strategy.

International Overlap & Depth
Another factor is that the TOP14 plays through more international traffic. Depth, JIFF/homegrown quotas and rotation discipline are non-negotiable in those periods, and enforced as much by the slog of 26-game seasons as it is by any tactical thinking around certain blocks. The URC staggers more around windows but adds a different stressor: South African travel blocks with heat/altitude and the hassle of getting there as a massive factor, especially if that travel happens in the middle of a block. You can be playing a home game in Limerick on a Friday and getting on a flight to Johannesburg a few days later for a game the following Saturday. So it’s less about sheer volume, more about peaking for specific clusters.

What Wins the TOP14 (26-game regular season)

Season Design: Aim unapologetically for the top two and the bye. You can be home-dominant and selective with away “raids” and still make it.
Point Strategy: Prioritise defensive bonus points away and deny the opponent any bonus at home. Try-bonus wins are the gravy rather than the weekly meat and potatoes.
Squad Build: Carry depth where the collisions are most expensive — front row and either 9 or 10 — and accept that you’ll manage availability across 30+ match weeks when Europe is included.
Tolerance for Dips: You can weather one or two form troughs if you keep the bonus-point leakage under control.

What Wins the URC (18-game regular season)

Season Design: Everything orbits a home quarter-final with, ideally, a home semi-final off the back of that. Your fate often hinges on 2–3 fixtures: local derbies and the SA tour.
Point Strategy: Deliberately hunt try-bonus wins against D/C-tier teams at home; accept losing BPs in A+ away games. One extra TBP now can replace the need to steal a road win later.
Squad Build: Less about endless depth, more about peaking for blocks. You need two 80-minute tighthead options, an altitude plan, and genuine bench impact.
Tolerance for dips: Minimal. Early banking matters. The points difference becomes a real seeding lever when the table compresses after Christmas

Practical Coaching Checklists

TOP14
• Target 13/13 at home; split away fixtures into must-compete (rivals) and resource-save (manage minutes).
• Build for April freshness with the bye in mind; the rest week changes everything.
• Take the away LBP and deny the home TBP — those micro-wins move you up two places+ by May.

URC
• Set a hard season goal: ≥60–65 points and a healthy points-difference harvest in banker games.
• Treat South Africa as a two-match project: one win or two LBPs is success; don’t chase speculative wins there, and ideally be in a position to be comfortable losing both.
• Ring-fence 3–4 fixtures for scripted TBP attempts; arrive with selection, and bench usage aligned to that objective.

At a basic level, the TOP14 rewards resilience, depth and the long game toward a precious semi-final bye. The URC rewards precision: bank early, engineer bonus points at home, survive the travel spikes, and protect your points difference.

With that in mind, I had a go at laying out what Munster’s schedule might look like this season, while also including the context of the week in question. If you have a rotten injury list coming up against a team that’s had to load up their selection because of damage earlier in the season, that can turn what looked like a five-point home banker into a dog fight. If you’re coming up against A+ opposition who find themselves in a spot of bother with injury or test callups, that can turn a game that you budget a losing bonus point for into one worth chasing with as much strength as you can put on the field.

Three games into the season is a decent place to check in with our schedule, so let’s see how we’re faring.

Standings Snapshot (after Round 3)

We currently sit second (level on points with the Stormers) on 14 points from 3 games. That’s 4.67 points per game, which is comfortably ahead of the typical home-quarter-final pace over the previous four iterations of this tournament.

  • R1: Scarlets 19–34 Munster — Away win with try bonus (+5)
  • R2: Munster 23–20 Cardiff — Home win (+4)
  • R3: Munster 20–19 Edinburgh — Home win with try bonus (+5)

The context here is that some teams have only played twice due to weather postponements, but the early signal is clear: we’re banking points while others in our strength band are recovering from slow starts. That’s been us for the last few years, so it’s a nice change heading into mid-October.

Strength-of-Schedule Lens (SoS): Plan vs Actual

I grade opponents and venue (home or away) to set a “plan” score for each game. B-tier at home is budgeted as 4 points, especially in the context of weather conditions, if we’re rotating against a team who’ve loaded up or some other real-life detail; C-tier away is a banked 4 points with wiggle room to jump to 5 points in the right context;  A+ sides at home 4, away 0–1, etc.

The idea is to track whether Munster are ahead or behind expectation.

Rounds 1–3 (Plan vs Actual)

  • R1 Scarlets (A, C-tier) — Plan: 4 | Actual: 5 → +1 vs plan
  • R2 Cardiff (H, C-tier) — Plan: 4 | Actual: 4 → On plan
  • R3 Edinburgh (H, B-tier) — Plan: 4 | Actual: 5 → +1 vs plan

Total after R3: Planned 12 vs Actual 14 → +2 buffer.

That +2 matters because it can be “spent” during the hardest block (away to Leinster, Glasgow, Sharks and the Bulls) without falling off home-QF pace.

What the Edinburgh Result Really Gives Us

Beating a strong B-tier side with a try bonus at home — especially when they’ve loaded up relative to our planned rotation/enforced test cooldown of guys like Crowley, Beirne, and Nankivell turns a standard “must-win 4” into a +1 cushion. Combined with the away try-bonus at Scarlets, we’ve already captured two of the most expensive league commodities: five-point wins in fixtures that don’t tend to hand them out all that freely, especially in context. Now, the Scarlets have started badly, so others might pick up that same bonus point in Llanelli, but I’d expect them to recover their form once they get a few bodies back from injury.

  • Trajectory: 14 from 3 keeps us tracking 60–64 points if we can average ~3.2 ppg from here.
  • Selection freedom: That cushion allows McMillan and his coaching staff to manage minutes around the A+ games without chasing marginal percentages every week.
  • Tiebreak texture: The try-bonus column and points difference (PD) become decisive later; Munster have to harvest PD vs Dragons (H) and Zebre (H).

The Next Three: What “Good” Looks Like

  • Leinster (A+, away): Plan 0–1. Anything ≥2 is beating the model.
  • Connacht (H, B-tier): Plan 4; stretch 5. The picture is complicated here by test callups, but both sides will be hurt by this equally.
  • Stormers (H, A+): Plan 4; 5 is a statement depending on their access to key Springboks.

Blocks to Watch (starting from 14 points):

  • Conservative: 0 + 4 + 4 → 22 after 6 (still on home-QF path).
  • Base case: 1 + 5 + 4 → 24 after 6 (comfortably ahead).
  • Aggressive: 4 + 5 + 5 → 28 after 6 (top-two conversation is live).

Points Strategy

Target 6 – 7 try-bonus wins across the season. With 2 in the first 3, we’re ahead of that cadence. Practical spots to chase TBPs: Dragons (H), Zebre (H), and the Ospreys in December. In South Africa, the priority is scoreboard control, and at least one losing bonus point if a win doesn’t materialise.

Munster currently trail the Stormers on PD despite being level on points. That isn’t an issue right now, but we’ve seen how good points difference can essentially become another point on the log later in the season. Ideally, we want to target +40 to +50 combined across the “banker” home games to improve seeding resilience if the table compresses from 2-6 on the log.

Three rounds in, we have converted a solid start into a strategic advantage: two try-bonus wins, one of them away, and a +2 buffer against plan. That keeps the team ahead of home-QF pace, buys rotation latitude before the A+ block, and reduces the season’s “must-steal” requirement on the road to one big scalp (or two smart LBPs) to keep a top-two finish firmly in play. How relevant will that be ahead of this week’s visit to Croke Park? At the moment, outside of any narratives that might spring up, keep it solidly in the 0>1 point range, which would not be the case had we lost at home to Edinburgh on Friday night.

It’s a long season, but it’s short too, and at the moment, we can afford to stick to the plan without overfocusing on any away game as it stands.