Exeter 13 Munster 8

Grit, bottle, defiance and attacking incoherence

The Munster Spirit was very much on show in Sandy Park but the defiance in defence was not matched with accuracy, efficiency or quality on the offensive side of the ball.

Match Quality

Match Intensity

Standard of Opposition

Match Importance

4.3

When you’ve had the last four games that Munster have had, you have to endure a lot of concern trolling from The Usual Suspects about where Munster are tactically, practically and spiritually. Just last week we had to experience the indignity of Robert Kitson – an English journalist with about as much connection to Thomond Park as I have to hair gel – essentially asking “where our f&%king pride was” in the Guardian with quotes from a Munster man who badly needs to be told what Don Corleone said to his son after he opened his mouth to people he shouldn’t.

“Never let anyone outside the family know what you’re thinking ever again.” 

I knew there would be a reaction this week from Munster after last week’s disappointment and there was. That reaction highlighted our issues – as well as our virtues – but I’ll get to those. Things aren’t great right now around Munster because of uncertainty and the majority of that uncertainty is around the coaching ticket for next season. In the absence of information in the five months since Van Graan announced he, along with Larkham and Ferreria, was leaving the province at the end of the season the IRFU have been going through the interview process for the replacements needed. The IRFU have been quite happy, actually, that there haven’t been any leaks from the process – bar Graham Rowntree being the new head coach as has been rumoured for the last six weeks – but that five-month spell has left the fanbase feeling anxious especially as Munster have lost six of the last 13 games since the turn of the year and, more recently, we’ve lost four of the last five games.

We’re at the end of the Van Graan/Larkham era, results are turning sour, injuries are piling up and the fanbase needs something. In the absence of a coaching announcement in the aftermath of Black Saturday, that something would have to be a classic, old school, backs against the wall Munster performance in Sandy Park.

And that’s exactly what we got.

♛ ♛ ♛

This was almost the perfect encapsulation of the “back to the wall” cliché.

Munster defended the try line with the kind of defiance that was so last-ditch and millimetres from failure that it was almost like something from a movie.

This is four tries saved and there were a few that didn’t make the cut. Exeter scored two tries but, arguably, left another five out there. The majority of those opportunities came from position earned off Munster penalties and, on another day, we’re looking at a second leg deficit of 15+ points if Exeter decided to change the habit of a lifetime and just kick their goals.

If they had even landed two or three of their kickable opportunities, they’d be out of sight in this tie because as good, as ballsy and as defiant as our defensive effort was it was matched by a blunt, error-strewn and confused attacking performance that highlighted all of Munster’s poorest days during the season to date.

At this stage, we can’t avoid talking about Munster’s injured and sick list because while not the full story of Munster’s blunt attack, it is part of the story. If any team was shorn of nine guys who would otherwise be near certain inclusions in the matchday squad and most of those as starters in a Category A game like this, things will usually not run all that smoothly against elite opposition. Yet that’s where Munster were this week, with four of those nine players dropping out the week of the game, including the club captain, the nominal starting #10 and one of the standout forwards in Europe.

It’s telling on its own that key guys for us in this game were either still in the academy or just one year into their very first senior contract at the province. Think about the last time that’s happened at Munster in a Champions Cup knockout game and… you’ll realise pretty quickly that there is no other time. This is entirely new territory.

Experience counts at this level but only good experience. Plenty of guys have experience of losing constantly at this level and I’m not sure if that’s what I’d want to be wrapped around me when the pressure goes up. When you see lads like Craig Casey, John Hodnett, Fineen Wycherley, Thomas Ahern and Jack O’Sullivan leading the way out on the field and this is more or less their first time out at this level, you realise the value and hope waiting in the wings at this province.

It won’t be long until they are the main attraction and the less they have to wait, I think the better everyone in red will be.

Either way, the attack wasn’t what it needed to be here by any means and while that has roots in inexperience at #10 and down chart options throughout the pack due to injury, it also reflects on the attack coaching on the whole and a relative lack of top, top quality in certain positions.

Before the game, I spoke about attacking Exeter on transition and using their four lock pack build against them. Early on, just such an opportunity popped up when Maunder made a sloppy box kick exit almost straight from the restart.

Instead of being the kind of clinical that you need to be to put away a side like Exeter, we left the moment slip through our fingers with poor passing, poor reset play and a lack of physicality at the breakdown. All of those things are visible in this sequence.

Two moments from Jeremy Loughman there weren’t of the quality required. The inside shoulder pass to Healy prevented Munster from attacking the transition directly and then he lost a collision, with neither Scannell nor Archer covering themselves in glory on the latch or at the collision point.

Loughman will be disappointed with this because passing is one of his key selling points and this wasn’t what it needed to be. Every heartbeat is important in the first two phases after a kick transition.

Weakness at the offensive collision point was a common theme of the defeat to Leinster and the same was true here, to an extent. Time and again, we fell short of where we needed to be which, when combined with forward passes, blown running lines and handling errors, made for grim viewing at times.

This is a good example of that principle – poor execution of the cross-kick to space coupled with desperately poor ball security at the breakdown on the reset.

You can’t get hammered like that on your own reset possession. That’s supposed to be a banker phase but an inaccurate clean on the first instance and a weak guard on the second turn what should be a launch point into an actively contested ruck on our own 10m line.

Time and again, our inability to set even basic phase protection around what should be rudimentary stage post rucks let us down. That has an effect on your playmakers too because that spreads doubt. If we can’t secure even the most basic of rucks off #9, what hope do we have of launching more expansive schemes? When you realise that a painful amount of our key ruck points in the early game were this flimsy, all of a sudden the shallowness of our attack makes sense. Your front five are there for ball security at a bare minimum and our front row were not having a good game as part of that unit.

It’s hard to be too harsh on these lads because we don’t know who was close to not making the game due to a nasty dose of gastro going around the squad as alluded to by Van Graan post-game but this is two weeks in a row that this unit have struggled with ball retention, clarity dominance.

They were far from the only players that didn’t have good games here either, by the way, but the game as it stands in 2022 cannot have poor ruck retention off #9 when what you need in that position is to be at your most crazed, brutish and dominant.

A lot of our problems are there. Not just in the carry but in the brutality around the carry that all of the elite sides have. Until that is fixed – and I don’t think it’s a case of the lads in question not trying their guts out because (a) they are and (b) I think they are who they are at this stage – then our attack will flounder regardless of who’s at #9, who’s at #10 or who’s carrying the ball.

It was such that we didn’t look like scoring at all until Exeter went down to 14 and then 13. Even when Exeter went down to 13 we struggled with clarity.

We blew the 5m lineout drive that, against 13 players, should have at least put us back within two points with a cheap technical penalty that we’ve been giving away all season long before following it up with a defensive penalty on the next one. We held up Exeter over the line a few minutes later before getting caught with a Stuart Hogg drop-goal off the goal-line drop-out.

We scored a try off – you guessed it – an Exeter kick transition from the restart. Watch for the principles I spoke about pre-game on this sequence. A good return, looking for width across the face of their four lock build and then the space will arrive.

The effect is exaggerated completely by the yellow cards but the principle is the same. The win was there for us but, despite getting right up to their 5m line for multiple sequences of pressure, we couldn’t get the score that would have tied us up and, perhaps, sent us to Limerick with a lead to defend. As with the rest of the attacking performance, it comes back to clarity, clarity, clarity.

The first example is just a skill problem-solving issue for Healy in the face of good defence. For me, Daly has to back his outside break there but he’s thinking that if he does that and gets scragged… will we secure the ruck? It’s all connected. The sequence that, essentially, killed this was in large part due to overswarming a ruck and killing our numbers so it was us who looked down a man, as opposed to Exeter. Personally, I’d have liked to see that get taken to the scrummage given Exeter had a prop off the pitch instead of using Scannell as a tap and go option but that’s hotel after the game coaching.

Exeter were there for the taking, but we couldn’t get the job done in Sandy Park. Reinforcements will arrive this week but how many remains to be seen.

Our European campaign hangs by a thread and waiting for the Thomond Park effect to bring us home won’t be enough. We need clarity, we need power and we need collision point brutality.

The Wally Ratings: Exeter (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.