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Munster 19 Castres 13

Ugly, tough to watch, sloppy but a win all the same

There weren't many positives to take from this game other than four points, some decent performances and minutes banked in a lot of legs that hadn't played in nearly two months.

Match Importance

Match Quality

Match Intensity

Standard of Opposition

3.8

This was not a fun game to watch live. It was the opposite of fun, in a lot of ways. Castres showed up to cheese the clock, stall in possession and make our possession expensive. We weren’t able to break them down as we’d have liked for reasons I’ll get into. Even though the game wasn’t fun, the experience of being in Thomond Park was.

I decided during the week that I wanted to be in the stands for this one because I haven’t been in a while outside the media section and being in the media section is… different. You’ve got a nice table with plugs for your devices, your own monitor, your own entrance and space but you’re a bit separated from the noise that often cascades down from the stands. The noise flows around you, like water around a stone in a river. Being in the stands or on the terrace is a whole other story. It’s an experience in and of itself before you ever look at the match. The view is better – there aren’t any bad views in Thomond Park – but you are part of the noise, you move with the ebb and flow of the game.

Plus, I can react how I normally do for tries and other big moments which is a little more like Rassie Erasmus than the cool, calm rugby writer guy I have to pretend to be when I’m on the job.

It gives you a unique perspective that you don’t get when you’ve got a laptop screen in front of you dominating your view. A Tweetdeck column blipping along at a hundred kilometres an hour, a tweet box that needs filling, a little orange cursor demanding attention in Sublime Text for on the whistle ratings makes actually watching the game in any meaningful way incredibly difficult. So this time I just sat there in the stands, roared, enjoyed the light show (Zombie was particularly cool) and just took everything in.

My first main takeaway was that Castres didn’t really want to play any rugby here. I knew pre-game that Castres played a lot of kick pressure but this was something else entirely. The Springboks, often accused of playing conservative rugby, had a Pass Per Carry Rating against the All Blacks back in the Rugby Championship of 0.96, which was pretty low. Munster’s dour loss to Leinster in Thomond Park in December 2020 had a Pass Per Carry Rating of 1.00 – essentially we chose to make one pass for every carry, which translates to a lot of one out rugby a lot of the time and a lot of kicking. Our poor performance in last year’s PRO14 final had a PPC rating of 1.05, which wasn’t much better.

In this game, Castres had a Pass Per Carry rating of 0.71, which is amongst the lowest I’ve ever seen since I started applying this metric. Now a high Pass Per Carry rating doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to win. We had a very high rating of 1.64 when we lost to the Ospreys before the international break and the COVID chaos but it didn’t mean anything on the scoreboard. That game, incidentally, is the last time a lot of the Munster players would have played and trained regularly.

Anyway, that metric will give you an idea of what Castres wanted to do here and what they didn’t want to do. They wanted to kick long, they wanted to pressure the return and they wanted to cheese the clock in possession. Ultimately, Castres wanted a static game where Munster would be forced to play through them – something quite you need size, power and intensity to do with any consistency.

When you have to play through Castres, their size in contact and weight over the ball become problematic on your setup phases. If you don’t have collision dominance or contact point dominance – where you don’t necessarily win the gain line collision but produce quick ball and subsequent defensive compressions – it can become a slog. This is the kind of scenario where Munster would need our forwards returning from isolation to really hit the ground running. Last weekend, the Munster side that played Wasps might have been had a fair few raw and inexperienced players amongst their number, but all of them had two solid weeks of training in them. The bulk of this Munster squad got out of isolation last Saturday after 10 days in isolation and, because of the six-day turnaround after the Wasps game, only managed two or three on-field sessions ahead of this game.

Is that an excuse? Maybe. A reason? Maybe. But they needed minutes at some stage to start the performance cycle over again after an unplanned hiatus away from the game/recover/train/game sequence that keeps players at peak performance. There is a happy medium between being being “fresh” and being so out of the flow match sharpness that you’re the few small percentage points off your peak that can cost you.

If you’re taking on a side like Castres, who are set up to be difficult to play against, you’ve got to get the pitch right. I don’t think we did. Selection wise, I felt our starting pack was too support forward orientated given the opposition. We tried to play around that though, to a middling effect. We didn’t come into this game expecting to run over Castres off #9 and we didn’t play like that either. We wanted to get width on the ball to compress and then attack Castres away from the compression but I felt some of our core passing wasn’t what it needed to be to crack them open.

Castres are heavy around the launch point – ruck, lineout, scrum – so we were trying to compress them around #10 and then launch into the space created outside.

A lot of these moments fell on Chris Farrell. He was the man running in the channel the space was designed to open up and overplayed a lot of his moments.

Even so, the decisive try came from this very concept with some lovely work being done in the offload to create the momentum down the flank.

This is a really well-taken score that’s worth looking at all the way through. It was a rare moment of momentum in a game mostly lacking it.

Some of that comes down to a janky enough performance between 9 and 10.

Murray’s main strength these days is his pass quality and range. His threat as a fringe runner isn’t what it used to be but he has often played around that with his kicking game (a well-known trait) and his excellent passing range. Murray won’t compress you around the fringe with his breaking threat much anymore but his passing range and accuracy usually negate that.

His passing here seemed a little windy at times and, when combined with some slow deliveries and ruck arrivals, we always seemed to be running on too many revs as we progressed through the phases. When you see Murray bypassing Healy to go straight to De Allende on that disallowed try in the first half, you see a highly experienced player snatching at an opportunity to impress. That ball needed to go to Healy so he could isolate Urdipilleta and execute the opportunity. By passing straight to De Allende, it set a race point for Castres with the ball hanging in the air and a needlessly tough finish from that range. De Allende’s a beast so he almost managed it but he was dealing with three defenders when he should have had a walk-in under the posts.

I also felt that, while Ben Healy played pretty well here, a lot of his performance seemed disconnected from Murray. He mixed some excellent long-range passing with a few sub-optimal options but this was a display that was improved from the last time we saw him at this level. I still feel he needs to improve on his decision making a little bit and that he would be better suited to a quicker, more agile #9 with a quicker action around the ruck. A scrumhalf that troubles the fringes consistently opens up lanes for a big #10 like Healy to play more on the front foot. Here, most of his involvements came moving sideways or at range where his relative lack of acceleration worked against him and forced him into traffic off balance or slinging passes long range.

The solution to that is Craig Casey, right? Casey looked like he was supposed to see 15 minutes at the end of this game but that got bumped to 10 when Munster won a penalty right as he was due to come on after a long kicking duel. Scrumhalf is a uniquely cardio dependent position so maybe this was a decision made with fitness in mind after a long isolation but the game was crying out for more pace in possession long before that.

Sure, if the ball goes dead on 65 minutes, Casey would have got to play out a close-range maul sequence but instead, those extra five minutes went to the incumbent near the try line as we pushed for a decisive score. We spent most of the next 10 minutes defending and Casey didn’t get to pass the ball once. That felt like a missed opportunity, especially with Castres blowing so hard you got the impression they’d try to get one of the forward’s mammies out to tie their shoelaces if it stopped the clock for an extra minute.

If you got the feeling that Munster never really managed to get some attacking purchase in this game – almost like we were consistently trying to do 100kph in second gear, I think you’re seeing a combination between our struggles in the collisions for most of the game, relatively slow delivery at halfback and errors at crucial times once we opened up Castres where we expected to. Our lineout work was generally really good bar one bricked lineout in a great position in the first half. If we’d nailed that close-range drive and, perhaps, converted that De Allende try ruled out for a knock-on under pressure, Castres would probably have folded up their tent and gone home. They didn’t want to be here anyway, after all. Instead, they clung on in there and produced the few kickable opportunities that kick pressure always does.

The biggest letdown, in my opinion, was our work on kick transition. Pre-game, I wrote about how Castres long kick-chase game has a glaring weakness on the far side of the field. They kick long, they swarm the landing zone and hit you hard on the return if you come down the wing they kicked from while also sending resources hard up the middle to choke you up if you half-commit to the counter. That leaves workable space on the far flank if you can get the ball there.

We knew that coming into the game and went after it repeatedly to mixed results.

A few fat passes, a few bad bounces of a ball after the kick, a few poor handling options and some clear try-scoring opportunities went begging, just like that. The opportunities were there but we just let them slip and slide out of our grasp again and again.

If it sounds like I’m being hyper-critical here, it’s because I am. In some ways, this had the feel of a preseason friendly because it felt like so many guys were getting back up to speed after, essentially, two months with no game and only two or three training sessions since the last week of November. This was always going to be the major on-field drawback of the covid nightmare in South Africa – getting guys back into peak condition. It’s not exactly like having another pre-season, but it isn’t that far removed from it either. The guys who are isolated at home after being stuck in South Africa with COVID  will have much the same issue when they return.

This game had an element of “biting the bullet” about it. We needed minutes in legs while also needing to break down a Castres side whose entire game is built around not giving you any opportunities – bar their far side kick-chase. It would have to be this game or next week’s game against Leinster – should it go ahead. Bar the financial implications, I hope it does because this group needs games now and lots of them week on week to get back into the performance sequence. You can’t just turn it on in the modern game. The margins have shrunk to the point where, if forced to choose between freshness because of weeks off or cohesion with a lot of minutes on the clock, I’d go with cohesion every time.

In the circumstances, a routine win that was built through fairly conservative penalty options was pretty good. Sure, it had the feel of a game where we left a bonus point out there but we missed all the sliding door moments along the way that could have produced that.

Castres wanted an ugly game and got it. It’s best to just bank the points, bank the minutes, get back training ASAP and roll on from there.

TOP TWO PERFORMERS

John Hodnett – I have a strong theory that, if not for an Achilles injury that he’s only just recovered from last season, John Hodnett would have had something close to a Gavin Coombes like impact during 2020/21. He’s having the roots of that impact right now. He was a core key last week, gutting it out to get back on the field after an ankle injury. He did the same thing this week and brought the kind of aggression, ball carrying impact and breakdown toughness that marks him out as a special small forward prospect. Unlike a lot of players of this role type, Hodnett’s ball carrying is already at a really high level. The acceleration, power and leg drive he gets in contact is really top class and he was a constant source of go-forward ball in traffic during this game against tough, heavy-hitting opposition.

Patrick Campbell – How good do you have to be to earn your pro-debut during a covid outbreak/travel nightmare but then keep your spot a week later when most of the senior guys return? Ask Pa Campbell. He’s 19. He’s only in the Munster Academy a month or so and was playing AIL for Young Munster a few weeks ago – I was there watching him! You could tell he was a premiere athlete but even then, the comfort at which he’s taken to this level is something special.

He’s just a natural athlete. A guy who gets the game, who gets the spatial awareness of it and who’s growing in confidence with every minute he gets on the field. He’s supposed to be with the U20s this year and, barring injury or him being consistently starting for Munster at senior level, he’ll be a star there too. An outstanding young talent he looked well at home at this level.

The Wally Ratings: Castres (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.