There’s no good way to lose to the Dragons.

Let’s just get that out there first. I’m going to explain why I think we lost to the Dragons in this article but when I do things like that, people tend to misread that as “making excuses”. These are not excuses. These are the reasons why a thing happened and the “thing” in this instance, is losing to the Dragons, a defeat which extends Munster’s losing streak this year to five games since we lost to Toulouse in May.

This unacceptable defeat highlights how far this group has to go. We’ve gone well beyond the days of blaming the coaches for losses like this. You might have gotten away with blaming the coaches in 2015/16 when a lot of these senior players were breaking into that “senior player” status but that plainly can’t be true four coaches and seven seasons later. I was speaking to a BBC commentator on Friday ahead of the game – he’s thorough – and he said “well, Munster will be stronger with those test guys back in the team, won’t they”. There was no question mark on that statement. To him, guys like O’Mahony starting, plus a hugely experience front row, plus Earls/Haley/Zebo and guys like Beirne and Carbery on the bench made Munster far more likely to win the game.

I wasn’t so sure. To me, that should have been “well, Munster will be stronger with those test guys back in the team. Won’t they?”.

Won’t they? I don’t know. I should know. We all should know. But I don’t. If anything, a bunch of our test guys coming back in ice cold a week or two earlier than expected – Casey excluded – was only going to make things more complicated. This is a totally new (to this group) high-speed, high-possession attacking framework that is fuelled on the back of high-speed, high-tempo training that some players are struggling to live with. Even being a high possession, high PPC team (1.5 Pass Per Carry Rating two games in a row) is new to the vast majority of this playing group. Most of the players who had bedded into this system the longest are currently switching planes in Doha at the time of writing so most of the team who came in for this game were coming in cold, on reduced training reps, less than three weeks out from a long off-week wedding.

They weren’t meant to be brought in for this game – the Emerging Ireland tour emerging out of nowhere meant they had to be called up earlier than planned – but these are senior internationals. Test players. The best we have to offer.

Sure, O’Mahony had some decent moments at the start of the second half before getting injured but he and Beirne, Carbery, Archer, Carbery and O’Donoghue – senior players, guys at the club for their entire career or brought in to be serious players for us – were so far from good enough here. They were supposed to be the guys coming in to bang home a win, sort things out and get us back on track but they didn’t do that. In some ways, it was almost the opposite.

After the game, an exasperated Graham Rowntree said the following;

“I’m not happy.” 

I told the lads I’m not happy with our discipline, inaccuracy, the way we were forcing things and our error count. I can’t have this. I was surprised about our inaccuracy particularly going into their 22′, and our ability to keep the ball in that key area. That really shocked me, I’ll be honest with you. Whoever you play, you’re going to have a challenge — particularly when you play away from home, regardless of what’s happened in the Dragons camp this week. I expected better in terms of the stuff we can do better. It was just so poor.

We had eight turnovers in the first half and were ill-disciplined. We lost lineouts, knocked on and we never got a foothold in the game. We had to address that and be patient. Just before half-time, we sorted that out but in the second half, we fell away in all those areas of the game, especially going into their 22‘. We had British [& Irish] Lions on the field but whoever has got the shirt, we just expected more accuracy.

We were just sloppy.”

In the first half, that sloppiness was mostly from the experienced heads you’d imagine would be steadying the ship. Those penalties lost us the game as much as any late try from the Dragons did or any one of the dozen or more errors you care to look at. Until that is addressed by the players themselves – not the coaches – then we will continue to have this conversation thrust upon us all season long.

We’re only two games into the season but we have unfinished business from last season to burn through, plainly. Look to the future, yes, but when the same guys are showing up looking as mentally fried as they did when they were dropping a deuce away to Leinster and Ulster last season such was their distress at losing on penalties to Toulouse in May then I think we need to address it.

That is the elephant in the room that we will need to eat one bite at a time, to mix metaphors to the point of derangement.

***

Offensively speaking, this was another game that hinted – however cryptically that might be – at what our new attacking approach might produce down the road.

It’s plainly not working at 100% capacity, or even close to that, but it is producing output that we can look at and give us clues as to where we’re going. Some of the “edges” that we’re going to produce and some of the shortfalls on the way to producing those edges were visible on our very first possession.

Our carrying target can be straight or grind back in against the grain but one thing is very clear – our inside “barrel” has to nuke that collision point as a dominant latcher or as a cleaner. They can’t commit to any action until they read the collision and you could see Archer struggling with the pace of that role throughout his time on the field. This inside cleaner has to be quick, has to nuke the contact and secure the ruck on feet to ward off any late arriving jackals from killing our tempo.

When you do that – especially with a wider “arrowhead” pod of three – you can block off a lot of space and essentially create pockets of space at either side of the collision point. You can work with that space, especially when it’s generated at high speed as part of a larger multi-phase sequence.

But if players don’t know their roles or aren’t suited to those roles, it causes problems that build up in the attacking system like sand in a gearbox. Ultimately, 3-3-1 is a system that runs on Radiating Options, Breakdown Accuracy/Brutality and Effective Blocking. If you can provide all three of these to a high level, you will create try-scoring opportunities during phase play against any side in the world, especially when you get up to six or seven phases in succession.

If you can only provide one or two of those to a high level, you’ll cause problems for decent teams. If you struggle to do any of them, you’ll lose to the Dragons.

But you can that if you even produce elements of this in flickers, you’ll create opportunities.

You can see here that the system works. What isn’t working is the consistency of the players trying to make the system work consistently. Stuff like our ball carrying rotation in that middle pod looks off, the quality of our inside “barrel” cleaners is inconsistent, our pass choice is often off-system and our ability to balance the width needed in the pods with the reactions and speed needed to adjust, clean and dominate collision points is way off where it needs to be.

Even stuff like our balance in the kicking game looks off. In this game, we seemed like we bailed out a little on the long, counter-transition kicking game we used against Cardiff because we were overly focused on the threat of the Dragons’ back three, especially down the flank we were kicking from where we were struggling to hide Archer as he escorted up the field.

So we kicked shorter and more contestably. That was a huge contributor to losing this game by inviting a bigger team onto us in a game where we struggled to impose ourselves physically and gave away a tonne of cheap defensive penalties.

Ultimately, this game showed me that what we are trying to do here – both in-game and during training – will expose quite quickly who is up to what we need and who isn’t. When you see lads looking like they’re a second behind everything, that’s a guy who is going to struggle to stay beyond the end of this season if they’re out of contract or stay as a Category A regular if they aren’t.

This is a high-speed game that will burn away all those unsuited to it as the season progresses. And the sooner that happens, the better everyone at Munster will be.

Notable Players

I thought Edwin Edogbo looked really good off the bench for his debut. He’s got size, and power and he’s not afraid to truck the ball hard and straight into whoever’s in his way. This kid is 19 and he looks more than up for this level of rugby. Give him minutes, training and luck with fitness and he could shock people this season.

Forget about the knock-on at the end – that was more to do with the pass than the catch – this guy is a serious prospect who’s got the physical stature to be a proper player for Munster way sooner than anyone expects. Remember this game and remember the name.

I thought Ben Healy looked decent, far better than last week. When he carries the ball off the screen, he establishes a threat that he can later use to bring what we know he’s good at into the game, namely his long-range passing. He still lacks impact with the ball in hand and in defence, for me, but he showed here that he gets what he needs to do, he just needs to do it consistently and with more variety. Improvement – that’s all we need to see, every single week.

Craig Casey came back from the summer tour and approached this game like a proper player. Proper players don’t need to cod anyone with excuses. They just show up and perform. He brought top class pass quality, he challenged around the ruck and he played with real tempo. He was getting pace into the game for us because he is this system embodied. Pace, tempo, aggression, accuracy.

You always know the real quality operators – especially the high usage ones who touch the ball more – by how quickly they slot right back into doing what proper players do. Does Casey need to bullshit anyone about needing time to build into the season? Not a chance, because you can see what this team means to him. He’s on his detail, he’s on his prep and he’s a proper professional leading by example out on the field despite coming in later than others.

This was a real captain’s performance from a guy who isn’t the captain, but on the evidence of this game probably should be.

Names	Rating
Dave Kilcoyne	★★★
Niall Scannell	★
Stephen Archer	★
Jean Kleyn	N/A
Fineen Wycherley	★
Jack O'Donoghue	★
Peter O'Mahony	★★★
Jack O'Sullivan	★★★
Craig Casey	★★★
Ben Healy	★★★
Simon Zebo	★★
Malakai Fekitoa	★★★
Dan Goggin	★★★
Keith Earls	N/A
Mike Haley	★★
Scott Buckley	★★
Liam O'Connor	★★★
Keynan Knox	★★★
Edwin Edogbo	★★★
Tadhg Beirne	★★
Paddy Patterson	★★
Joey Carbery	★★
Liam Coombes	★★★