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Munster 45 Wasps 7

A dominant win against an opponent made to look worse than they are.

Beating a Wasps side who, more or less, have recently put away Leicester and Toulouse is notable, not because of the scoreline, but with the ease that they were nullified and, ultimately, put away.

Match Importance

Match Intensity

Match Quality

Standard of Opposition

3.5

Four from four.

If you’d told me back in late November 2021 that Munster would go unbeaten home and away in the European Cup pools and only lose one game in the URC by the end of the block of games before the Irish Six Nations camp, I’d have said you were very, very optimistic. At that time, Munster were stuck in South Africa during the height of what would become the Omicron wave and most people I spoke to were either deeply cautious about what would become of the season or at apocalyptic “we could be in the Challenge Cup and in massive trouble in the URC if things play out badly” levels of angst.

That’s how big a deal it is to lose the guts of two months in the middle of the season where the bulk of your senior squad go into varying levels of isolation in hotels and across hemispheres. To put it into context, Munster only got a full complement of players and a proper training routine of review>training>game>review back into action the week of the Ulster game, which was three weeks ago today.

That is one of those things that become “excuse-making” when you are analysing from a position of bad faith. Either training and preparation are important, or they aren’t. If you want to engage with Munster’s performances post-November, you have to include that disruption into your work to get the full picture but you also need to factor in the quality of the opposition. I think we finally saw this week what a good team Castres, for example, actually are when they could and – if not for some hilariously terrible officiating – should have beaten everyone’s ideal of sexy rugby, Harlequins, in the Stoop. If you’ve been reading here, though, you knew all this back in December.

Will Castres performance in the Stoop change the perception of Munster’s mid-season block just by pure rugby maths alone? As in, Harlequins = Good so if Castres should have beaten them that means Castres = Good so if Munster beat Castres twice that means Munster equals… Good? We’ll wait and see. It didn’t work when Munster beat Ulster with 14 men, so I won’t hold my breath.

Even then, what is perception, really? When it comes down to it, it’s a manufactured angle that only exists in the media bubble. Columns lead to presser questions which lead to radio segments which lead to podcast clips of guys reacting to being shared which leads to pre-game questions being asked about the noise by people in the Noise Business. Noise on podcasts? Journalists making tits of themselves in pressers? I think anyone who has watched the games without listening to the backing track

All that brings us to Wasps. Will the transitive power of rugby maths empower Munster with the defeated auras of Toulouse and Leicester?

No.

But the five points and some good vibes will do nicely all the same.

♛ ♛ ♛

Munster are a very difficult side to play against. We seem to specialise in taking portions of your best game away from you. With an analyst as cutting as Van Graan as head coach – along with the likes of Murray, Larkham, Rowntree and Ferreira around him – we are rarely taken by surprise by our opposition. That can lead to overly reactive game plans at times, as I have previously written about, but it can also lead to games like this where the opposition seems to wither under the glare of Van Graan’s microscope.

Wasps were just blunted. Systematically and methodically. The loss of Umaga and Gopperth mid-week and Ryan Mills pre-game would have had an impact on Wasps attacking game, for sure, because it would have loaded all of their game management onto young Charlie Atkinson but even then they had nothing at all to fall back on here.

I wondered in the Red Eye if Munster would look to play more off-ball and transition to a more on-ball style as the game progressed and it largely played out like that, even if it might not have seemed it. Munster kicked less – way less – than we did against Castres because Wasps didn’t kick. Our kicking, for the most part, is reactive in nature. We will kick to space, sure, but games where we end up kicking an awful lot, certainly post-Ospreys, are reactions to teams who kick heavily to us. We’ll get a good idea of how we react to teams bigger than us later in the season but when Wasps made an active decision not to kick in any real volume in this game (18 kicks total) it meant that we would reflect that in kind.

Wasps relative lack of kicking played into the game. They had 56% possession, 49% territory overall and that decision making to play on-ball where possible and minimise their kicking game played a large part in Munster’s offensive output, certainly in the first half.

If you want a quick and easy illustration of Wasps’ relative lack of nous – awful word but it’ll do here – it would be this exit sequence.

That lead to a handy three points for Munster and was, in large part, rooted in Wasps decision making. Moments like this are where they really missed Jimmy Gopperth and, to a lesser extent, Jacob Umaga.

When you don’t kick the ball with any real volume, Munster become a very, very difficult team to play against. We blitz, we blitz drift, we fold really well more often than not and we switch between competing and non-competing at the breakdown at a best-in-Europe level. We are an ever-shifting puzzle with good collision winners and a roster of some of the best breakdown threats in the game in Peter O’Mahony and the outstanding Tadhg Beirne.

When you combine that with one of the best defensive lineouts and defensive mauls in the game at this level, you have an incredibly difficult side to get any point of access on. If every avenue of attack is heavily contested outside of literally surrendering possession by kicking the ball away.

Our starting back five was about as strong a defensive unit as we can currently field when you consider all facets of defence – lineout, maul and impact phase play. The lineout, in particular, allowed Munster to lever Wasps into sub-optimal positions almost constantly.

Their lineout platform became an attackable point for our defence because all of our back five are capable of either counter-launching effectively, stopping runners off the lineout or stopping maul momentum stone dead with starting body positions closer to scrummaging than what you would normally see at the maul.

That allowed Munster to play an aggressive off-ball game that allowed for multiple on-ball opportunities.

I spoke before the game about our need to improve on transition and while we weren’t perfect in that regard by any means, we were better than we have been in the last few weeks. More cohesion, more time together = more imagination, more self-expression and better performances.

The second half started brightly but slipped into janky disorder as Munster emptied the bench between the 50th and 65th minute. Some of our lifting cohesion dipped at the lineout, we missed the go-forward we got regularly from Gavin Coombes and the game drifted until the last five minutes. Munster upped the pace a good bit in the dying embers of the game and that injection of pace produced some opportunities that, eventually, we managed to put away quite well after a few lineout misfires.

With a Wasps man in the bin, the confetti scores came handy enough. Zebo went over in the corner off a well-built maul break before a lovely strike off a lineout with the clock in the red added an exclamation mark to the win. When you watch it back and see that late charge being lead by the Wycherley brothers, Alex Kendellen, John Hodnett, Jack Crowley, Scott Buckley and Craig Casey, you can’t but be impressed.

Four games, four wins. That’s nothing to sniff at. This game gave me a real indication of what Munster could yet do this season as we bank more cohesion and develop more of these young talents who are growing with every minute they get. It was far from perfect. Bar Scarlets, I think we’re still waiting for a complete 80-minute performance but we’re seeing development week on week on week. I think it’s clear that we’re a very well-coached, very well-drilled side that knows, intellectually, how to win games. There is a question about how we translate that intellectual knowledge into the physical realm against the very best and very biggest opposition. I have no doubt we know how to beat the likes of Leinster, La Rochelle, Toulouse and Racing 92 but whether we have the physical power to match them at key moments remains to be seen. This isn’t a case of “attacking evolution” or whatever the latest canard around the place is, it is a question of raw physical power. If we can get one or two top-end physical components into the side – and I believe they are in the squad – in the next four or five months, we have the talent to trouble any side with our defensive prowess all over the field and our tactical discipline.

These next few months will be crucial in getting those players fit, ready and challenging at the top end of our depth charts.

It will be a must-watch end block of the season for those reasons alone.

Top Performer

I have often criticised Munster’s front row in the last few seasons but this week was a great example of how well they can be used. I thought Stephen Archer was the standout performer for me. His breakdown work was constantly heavy and effective, his scrummaging was incredibly stable and technically proficient, his mauling was of the highest standard and his defensive work rate was constant.

At 33 – soon to be 34 – Archer is playing some of the best rugby of his career. That’s not just in this game – this has been since the return after the Omicron Incident in South Africa. He’s not Tadhg Furlong – only Tadhg Furlong is Tadhg Furlong – but what Stephen Archer is is an extremely effective player who is operating at a high level with a deep understanding of his role. A quality performance. ★★★★★

The Wally Ratings: Wasps (H)

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.