[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]M[/su_dropcap]unster could and probably should have lost this game and yet here we are with four points in our back pocket going into the test window break. I won’t try to sell you on an idea that what you saw from Munster here was bad luck combined with hidden, unseen nuance that meant a win was inevitable. We were pretty poor here, I would say, and that’s being a little kind when describing parts of the second half in particular.

BUT.

Do you know what I see when I see a team losing with less than two minutes left on the clock win a killer breakdown penalty in their own 22, drive it up the field and then force their way into a position where they could open up a shot for a drop-goal with the clock in the red and then snatch that? I see a team with grit.

Look at this sequence – the steal, the kick, the lineout take, the maul, the setup, McCarthy’s perfect – and I mean perfect – pass back to Hanrahan and then the pure, clean strike to sink the dagger deep into Benetton’s chest with the last action of the match.

A lot of teams play poorly every now and then. A lot of teams shorn of all their current internationals can fly out to Italy in a COVID bubble and put together a janky, disjointed performance with a team that hasn’t played together since November. A lot of teams could then go on to lose all control of the game and find themselves losing with 10 minutes to play. But not a lot of teams could produce what Munster did in that last two minutes.

Whatever about anything else, that is a good thing to have in the back pocket.

***

But how did we get to the point of needing a drop goal in sweaty time?

Well, that’s a complex question. First of all, I thought Benetton were massively underrated coming into this game and this result can be filed as another example of a game Benetton should have won, but somehow didn’t. It looked like it could be a long night at the office for them inside the first 10 minutes as Munster scored two tries in quick succession.

Our first try was a pretty well-taken maul break where we converted two relatively average carries from Scannell and Holland into a dynamic wider break when Gavin and then Liam Coombes off a Holland pop pass gave us a deep position in the Benetton 22.  The play ran out of steam for a second when Nick McCarthy lost track of the ball for a few seconds and that allowed Benetton to number up. The sequence was pretty much dead before Haley pulled a high lob out of nowhere that somehow stayed in touch, completely bamboozling Hayward into an error that Sweetnam mopped up excellently.

The second try came in the aftermath of a kicking duel where Benetton won possession but were too hasty in their desire to go wide. Liam Coombes nabbed the ball out of the air and started a nice series of offloads that ended with McCarthy popping the ball off the floor for Niall Scannell to run home an excellent counter-attack try.

Two Benetton mistakes, two Munster tries.

Despite this excellent start, it would be Munster who would go onto have una brutta giornata in ufficio. For the next 70 minutes at least. If I were to describe why that was, the one phrase that comes to mind is “wide when we needed a hit and a hit when we needed wide”. Too often, in my opinion, we made poor decisions in possession that either passed up obvious attacking lanes or put non-suitable carriers into collision points they were unlikely to win. This would be what you’d expect when you have a team with low on-field cohesion in a tricky away game but it played into how this game got out of control.

Here’s a small example;

We earned wide ruck position off a maul break but gave up quick ball when McCarthy had to clear the ruck. Even then, we could work with the position and the slow ball but to be most effective, our hit up off #9 would have to produce a dominant collision point.

We didn’t get it. Archer got stopped and slowed so when we moved the ball wide again, everything had to be that bit more complex. Coombes pull back to Healy was really good but, in this instance, I’d have liked Healy to have a cut on the gainline rather than sling the ball wide. We had a penalty advantage, though, so you can forgive the desire to put air on the ball in this instance. The big things to remember from this sequence is; slow ball + non-dominant collision = smaller attacking margins.

Here’s another example of Munster’s general scheme working to generate expected positions but, in my opinion, it was let down by a sub-optimal decision in a key moment.

The first half of this is exactly “on scheme”. We get the ball into Liam Coombes hands and he makes a good wide break that fully extends Benetton’s defensive line. I can see what McCarthy was looking to do on this break but it is a sub-optimal decision for me when we had Benetton stretched across the field and clustering on a wide ruck.

That’s exactly the picture we’d have looked to generate pre-game. Look at their centre-field defensive line – four of their tight five stretched out over 30 metres – I think breaking around the fringe actually helped Benetton’s defensive effort here.

Sure, there’s a clear penalty to Munster for not rolling away that got missed but forget about that for a minute – we generated a perfect position that we were set up to go after but made a decision in the moment that went off-scheme.

Anytime you make a decision to carry rather than pass, you need to dominate that contact point otherwise, why carry the ball at all? Over time, these little microdecisions – pass/don’t pass – begin to add up. If you pass too much and don’t carry, the opposition will start drifting on your possession and your pass targets have more engaged defenders to deal with. Carry too much without getting consistent collision wins instead of passing and you ask questions over whether you are on top of your role set in the squad itself.

Here’s a few examples of a few carries that, for me, should have been passed.

The second example is particularly striking for me because Benetton are down to 14 men on a long kick transition so the only play that makes sense here is to get the ball wide to Sweetnam and Coombes. At best, Coombes/Sweetnam power over in the corner but at worst in a scenario where we retain the ball, they make the break down the line that completely stretches out Benetton on the next phase. Instead, we get a step inside and an offload that Benetton handle relatively well.

The last two examples are the product of kicking duels, which I spoke about at length in the Red Eye. Kicking duels aren’t an end unto themselves because the idea is to produce a specific outcome and in this instance, it was a wide-wide ruck position earned by attacking Benetton’s kick transition defence but any time you get wide-wide ruck position the opportunities would be there to have a crack at Benetton right up the middle of the field. On the Blood & Thunder Podcast, I spoke about how you could effectively isolate Zuliani in the central position if you stacked your layers correctly.

If you can put some layers on your next phase after securing a wide-wide ruck position, there will be space right up the middle of the field if you can get two early passes to that position on a 3-2 shape.

We had an opportunity to use this very attack midway through the first half. What were the roots of the sequence? A counter-attacking sequence off a kickback where we used wide-wide patterns. Watch the last phase, keep an eye on Zuliani’s starting position and the gap he opens up.

Small margins. The pass needed to come across Healy’s body quicker, for sure, but it’s a sign that we were producing the pictures we wanted in general while not executing at key moments during those sequences.

When you combine those poor on-ball decisions with no real scrum dominance – there were six scrums total over the 60 minutes – no real ability to move Benetton around in the maul and our tendency to lose kicking duels as the game progressed, you get a picture of how Munster lost their way in this game.

Here’s an example of a lost kicking duel midway through the second half. Keep in mind that 29% possession and 22% territory during this period so any kick we execute needs to be perfect.

First issue; the box kick is off target by 10 metres. When Hayward takes this ball, he has a 15m blindside to work with and the entire openside so Munster can’t just stack the openside. That gives Benetton more options off the kick which opens up space for what happens next.

Mike Haley is put into a position to make an error because Benetton are kicking on their terms with the game flowing through them. As the second half progressed, we began to regress with our kicking and couldn’t really navigate our way out of the massive possession and territory differential we were experiencing.

Look at this extended kicking duel and how we switched off right at the end and, as a result, conceded killer metres.

Loughman and Cloete can’t look at their scrumhalf in a maul with two Benetton forwards and stay out like this. Well, they can but if they do it’ll produce a moment like the above more often than not.

When you concede space like this, it’s quite likely that, if the opposition can hang onto the ball, there’ll be penalties and, from penalties, they can further turn the screw. That kind of sequence – concede ground, soak up possession, concede penalty, concede more ground – leads directly to this opportunity, which Benetton should have scored from if not for Mike Haley.

Rory Scannell made a big decision to step out on this play across after O’Byrne and Loughman got a little tight on the ruck.

Great defence by Haley, to be fair, and Liam Coombes can be delighted with his last-second scrag to unbalance Benvenuti but this was a product of the territorial pressure we were experiencing. Benetton would score on the next phase, straight from the scrum.

This was a study in eliminating defenders through lines. The first decoy runner stood up Scannell, so he was out of the chase. The second decoy runner bumped De Allende out of the chase of the ball so it was left to a wide 2 on 2 with Haley having to gamble on a side when the ball reached the end of the line.

It was well executed and should have been the last nail in the coffin but, as we know, you need long coffin nails when you’re trying to bury Munster. The restart was a microcosm of where we’d had issues earlier in the game. We entered into a long kicking duel looking for position. What did we want? To unbalance Benetton with a wide-wide ruck position off a kicking sequence but we failed to produce the collision we wanted to right at the end of this sequence when Holland got separated from his cleaners on the floor.

From there, Jack O’Donoghue made two massive lineout steals but even that wasn’t enough, as Benetton had the ball right up until the 79th minute and the 22nd second. Want to see a big play? Look at Billy Holland wiping across the cleanout to give Cloete an extra second to get his jackal in place.

And you know what happened from there.

This was an imperfect performance from Munster, to put it mildly, but I didn’t see any big, systemic issues here outside of things we already knew coming into this. This group have more than enough credit in the bank to afford a bad night away in Treviso that ultimately, ended up in the win column. That opens up a 15 point gap at the top of Conference B with our nearest rivals – Connacht and their two games in hand – having to be perfect from here on out to even come close to catching us. Another two wins will do it for Munster so take the lessons from this game, and there are a few, take the three-week downtime and then build cohesion for a big game in Edinburgh three weeks from now.

Notable Players

This wasn’t a great performance collectively speaking but there were three players that stood out to me.

Gavin has been picking up a lot of the plaudits this season but this was Liam Coombe’s turn. He was everywhere. With a power winger like Coombes, you want to get the ball in his hands so he can earn you wide position with his pace and, well, power. The clue is in the name there. All through this contest, Coombes was making metres in the wide spaces when he was backed with possession.

I’d have loved to see him get his hands on the ball in this kind of counter-attack position. Let him show off that pace!

He made a great break earlier in the half that, by this time next year with a bit of luck and confidence, he’ll be backing himself to burn the full-back on the outside in this kind of scenario.

This ended up OK in the end but I think Liam Coombes is a player that has top-end potential and this game was a tantalising look into what could be possible. The pass he snatched out of the air, the offload he made to Goggin and the constant ground he made in wide positions was a key part in the winning of this game for Munster.

Thomas Ahern’s performance off the bench was exactly what we needed. Who wouldn’t want a 6’9″ monster trucking off the bench and winning three vital collisions that put Munster in a position to win the game? He has the potential to be an absolute superstar and this was another example of what could be possible for one of the biggest human beings I’ve ever seen in my life.

I’ve criticised JJ Hanrahan quite a bit this season – fairly, I think – so when I see him coming off the bench like this and coming up with the goods when it matters most, it makes me really happy.

I WANT to see guys succeed.

I WANT to see players showing up in big moments and clutching them for the win.

So when I see JJ having a bad night off the tee like last week or missing a drop goal against Racing, it pisses me off because I know he’s capable of this.

Keep in mind that a few minutes before this, JJ knocked on a high ball that looked like it had killed any hope of a comeback but when the opportunity came to drive the ball upfield, Hanrahan nuked it exactly where it needed to be like the kind of deranged amnesiac that every good flyhalf has to be.

“Mistake? Me? No, I win games.”

And then he does just that. ★★★★

 

The Wally Ratings: Benetton (A)

The Wally Ratings explainer page is here.  

Players are rated based on their time on the pitch, if they were playing notably out of position, and on the overall curve of the team performance. DNP means the player did not feature and N/A means they weren’t on the pitch long enough to warrant a fair rating.

Names	Rating
Josh Wycherley	★★★
Niall Scannell	★★★
Stephen Archer	★★★
Fineen Wycherley	★★★
Billy Holland	★★★
Jack O'Donoghue	★★★
Chris Cloete	★★★
Gavin Coombes	★★★
Nick McCarthy	★★★
Ben Healy	★★
Darren Sweetnam	★★★
Rory Scannell	★★
Dan Goggin	★★★
Liam Coombes	★★★★
Mike Haley	★★
Kevin O'Byrne	★★★
Jeremy Loughman	★★★
John Ryan	★★★
Tom Ahern	★★★★
Tommy O'Donnell	★★★
Paddy Patterson	DNP
JJ Hanrahan	★★★★
Damian De Allende	★★★