This one hurts more because it was a game we legitimately should have won.
I’ve seen a lot of the crowing in my mentions and emails from Leinster guys who thought it was never in any doubt but having watched the game back, that’s the usual bluster. I truly believe that Munster know, intellectually speaking, how to beat this Leinster side. I think that Munster now have the physical threats to actually implement that game plan fully but we won’t ever beat Leinster if we keep missing opportunities to beat them.
That was true in September, it was true in December 2019, it’s true today.
Ultimately, Munster left six points behind on the tee and lost by three points. We can collectivise the loss to an extent because that’s what tends to happen in this game – win as a team, lose as a team – but to pretend that those missed points aren’t important in a game you lose by three points would be to ignore the elephant in the room. It’s like standing on the N20 outside Buttevant looking at a flat tire and trying to intellectualise why you didn’t go the M8 way – the problem is the flat tire, not a hypothetical scenario that isn’t actually happening right now.
Make no mistake about it, Munster pulled defeat out of the jaws of victory here. In one way, that’s encouraging because we’ve rarely been in that position against a full-strength Leinster over the last five games but in another, larger way, it’s beyond frustrating that we let a 10 point lead slip to a three-point defeat. You lose a lead like that by losing a load of small moments in a row. Here’s a sequence of those.
Munster were gifted an opportunity at the end of the first half to hammer a nail into the Leinster coffin after Caelan Doris conceded a daft penalty on a box-kick setup. It was right in Hanrahan’s range, given he nailed a kick from further out and at a wider angle right at the start of the half.
I don’t blame Hanrahan for missing this penalty – it’s pretty long range – but with the clock in the red we just need to keep what we have. 13-3 ideally, 10-3 at worst but not whatever this was.
Off the post? It happens. It becomes problematic when you add it to other pressure kicks not made in the recent past but it’s an understandable slip. Conceding a needless penalty for sliding feet first after the ball? We don’t need that. Conceding a doubly needless perfect example of “not releasing in the tackle” when Leinster were going nowhere on our 10m line? We really didn’t need that.
Sexton was given an opportunity to hurt Munster and he didn’t miss his opportunity.
From standing over a penalty with a 7 point lead with the clock gone red to running into the sheds with a four-point lead four minutes later. Self-inflicted wounds are the ones that hurt the most.
Speaking of self-inflicted wounds, our lineout work at the end of the first quarter was a perfect illustration of losing consecutive moments.
That last one is a killer. We had defended Leinster quite well in that middle space which, while not ideal because they got that position from our lineout, was certainly manageable up until we lost our discipline with a sloppy high tackle. Leinster spent the next 15 minutes deep in our territory and it was only the quality, power and jackal threat that kept them out to the point that Tadhg Beirne’s breakdown penalty on our try line on 35 minutes felt like a big moment in the game.
We had absorbed 20 minutes of heavy Leinster pressure deep in our territory and had only conceded three points. If we’d managed to see out the half with that scoreboard, I think we’d have been happy enough with that mini-win but, as we know, that isn’t what happened.
***
The second half started quite well from a Munster POV. We were making ground off #9 thanks to some good crash structures that allowed Beirne, Coombes and Marshall to make ground up the middle of the field. There were a few concerning moments, even at this early stage in the half, of Hanrahan being off his best. These are just two phases but they do not show the direction I would want in these situations. The swivel to De Allende does nothing to deflect Connors or the outside Leinster blitz (something he would repeat a few minutes later).
When the ball comes around again, there’s a potential Munster overload on the blindside but Hanrahan doesn’t want the pass back off the screen and the chance is gone. It doesn’t matter in this instance because Munster would go onto win a penalty at close range after Porter was caught offside but, as with the opportunity at the end of the first half, we would not convert the pressure into points.
That set off a chain of events where nothing went right for Hanrahan. He pushed the penalty off to the right and, when Munster won a big breakdown penalty off the Leinster restart outside the Leinster 22, he could only get four or five metres off the kick down the line.
It wasn’t just missed kicks down the line, it was some pretty average decisions and executions in open play and off the set-piece where he seemed to go into his shell a little. Ben Healy was on the field in the 52nd minute to try to see out the game. A lot has been placed on Healy’s shoulders this season even though he’s still in the academy. In some ways, he is the mirror to Hanrahan this season which, in the continued long-term absence of Joey Carbery, has pushed Healy into a conceptual prominence that he might not have under “normal” circumstances. I think he’s got the capacity to be an outstanding player over the next few years, but he is still a bit away from being that player right now. During his time on the field, Munster had a fair bit of possession and Healy certainly wasn’t afraid to have a crack but we weren’t able to unbalance Leinster, despite generating decent position at times.
Offensively, we seemed to compress our attacking shape a little to hammer Leinster in central spaces to (a) possibly generate a Leinster infringement or (b) extend our backline outside Leinster and then look to put the ball into space. Leinster weren’t competing at the breakdown – something they have done consistently against Munster in recent games – so we were trying to force a compression through the weight of ruck numbers in central spaces.
Neither plan was fully successful. The heavy pitch and ice-cold, wet conditions played a part in Munster’s stodgy chase of the game, as did the mental switch from defending a narrow lead through our use of territory to then having to go out and win the game with the ball in hand, but we committed the cardinal sin of losing control of the scoreboard with 10 minutes to play against top-class opposition.
If Leinster have a sniff of a win with 10 minutes left, they have shown again and again that they will take their opportunities if you aren’t able to.
Sure, the lineout was crooked, but Leinster produced the perfect, incisive set-piece at the perfect time to win them the game. Earls slipping as he covers across and a kick hopping off Daly’s foot into Keenan’s path is just what happens when you are trying to defend an opponent who are practised in producing winning moments in succession. They wouldn’t even have been in this position had we not been caught marginally offside on a nothing Leinster exit but that’s what happens when you allow Leinster to take the lead at a killer point in the game. They take it.
All the bullshit about box kicking during the week was shown to be what it always was – abject nonsense created by the loudest empty vessels. Munster’s box kicking strategy worked to perfection. It created several good positions and opportunities that, had we taken them, would have probably won the game nine times out of ten. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? You can survive the lineout being a mess – comfortably the worst display of the season on that front – but you can’t survive playing a tight, territory-based game against high-quality opposition without a goal kicker who can punish teams ruthlessly.
There were lots of positives for Munster in this game. I thought our close-range defence, heavy breakdown jackaling and territorial management off #9 were excellent. I thought it was our best game against Leinster from a collision dominance perspective, at least in the opening quarters of both halves, and while our game plan to create compressions in an environment where Leinster didn’t compete at the breakdown ran into willing defenders again and again in the fourth quarter, I thought that was a tactically coherent approach, at least while we were winning. When we were suddenly losing, however, we didn’t have the game to generate a winning score without a mistake that Leinster were never likely to make. The scoreboard might have changed in Leinster’s favour in the 70th minute but we put ourselves in a position to lose directly before and directly after halftime.
This loss wasn’t fatal to Munster’s season but it does narrow our margins in Conference B and put a lot of pressure on the Benetton game next week. That is now a must-win game. This loss and the manner of it also puts pressure on our plans at #10 but that’s a story for another day.
Losing to Leinster is not new for this squad and the manner of this defeat will not sit well over the next few weeks and months. We know how to beat Leinster, that much is clear, but until we do it’s all just Xs and Os on a screen. Sure, knowing exactly what went wrong here – goal kicking and the lineout – provides some form of clarity but make no mistake, this will sting for a long time until we next face Leinster, whenever that may be.
Notable Players
I’ve criticised JJ Hanrahan quite a bit on these pages over the last year. I don’t like doing it. I would love to be talking about JJ Hanrahan’s winning drop goal against Racing 92 back in 2018. I’d love to be talking about his ice-cold performance off the tee that beat Leinster in a PRO14 semi-final. I’d love to be talking about his goal kicking last night that gave Munster a 16-13 win over Leinster. But I’m not, because those things didn’t happen.
And there’s no changing that they didn’t happen. A few weeks ago, I wrote this about JJ Hanrahan in the aftermath of his kicking against Clermont;
It is no exaggeration to say that Hanrahan won this game for Munster off the tee and he did so from all over the pitch. Sure, he blotted his copybook with a few missed touches but when you’re sticking the ball between the posts when it counts in the toughest place to go in Europe, you deserve all the plaudits you get
The inverse is also true – when you are not sticking the ball between the posts against one of the best teams in Europe, you are going to be criticised. If it were purely just his kicking, it would be easier to handle but it isn’t. In some games, he can’t miss in others when the pressure comes on, nothing seems to work for him. The problem comes in that inconsistency. He isn’t a bad player but this was an example of a guy having a bad game when he really, really needed a good one.
Rhys Marshall didn’t have a game worth remembering here. He was decent around the field but his work in the lineout lacked accuracy and consistency. James Cronin had an effective night in the scrum and around the field, for the most part, but he coughed up four penalties, some of them incredibly costly.
This was one of the better games played by Conor Murray in the last few months. His box kicking was incredibly effective, he mixed up his work around the ruck really well and showed up strongly in defence. Murray applied the game plan perfectly but when we lost control of the scoreboard with 10 minutes to play, Craig Casey was left with little time to influence the game outside of continuing what had come before.
I thought that Jean Kleyn had an outstanding game for Munster that would have scaled up to a five-star performance had Munster managed the win. He hit rucks, dominated collisions on both sides of the ball and ended up being our most reliable lineout option. Quality.
Mike Haley had a really prominent game for Munster in the backfield. He had one or two costly errors, sure, but his fielding and kicking for most of the game was a real positive on a difficult night for both skills.
Gavin Coombes had a really prominent game during his time on the field and was comfortably our biggest on-ball threat as well as being an impactful defensive hitter. If he hadn’t done enough to get Irish consideration before this game, his performance here surely did enough.
Tadhg Beirne won Player of the Match on the night and deservedly so. Had Munster won, he’d have another five-star performance in his back pocket but that obviously wasn’t to be. I thought Beirne’s work on-ball and at the breakdown repeatedly bailed Munster out of deep defensive trench warfare but, on the other side of it, I felt he could have simplified Munster’s lineout on a day when both Marshall and Scannell were finding it difficult to hit their jumpers.
The Wally Ratings: Leinster (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.
| Names | Rating |
|---|---|
| James Cronin | ★★ |
| Rhys Marshall | ★★ |
| John Ryan | ★★★ |
| Jean Kleyn | ★★★★ |
| Tadhg Beirne | ★★★★ |
| Gavin Coombes | ★★★★ |
| Peter O'Mahony | ★★★ |
| CJ Stander | ★★★ |
| Conor Murray | ★★★★ |
| JJ Hanrahan | ★ |
| Shane Daly | ★★★ |
| Damian De Allende | ★★★ |
| Chris Farrell | ★★★ |
| Keith Earls | ★★ |
| Mike Haley | ★★★★ |
| Niall Scannell | ★★ |
| Dave Kilcoyne | ★★★ |
| Stephen Archer | ★★★ |
| Fineen Wycherley | ★★★ |
| Jack O'Donoghue | ★★★ |
| Craig Casey | N/A |
| Ben Healy | ★★★ |
| Rory Scannell | DNP |
