Rugby is a tough game to play going backwards.

If you’re going backwards in attack, you’re losing but losing slowly. If you’re going backwards in defence, you’re losing and losing fast.

It’s the simple beauty of rugby. The complexity of the game often boils down to “how many times did you knock the opponent back?” on both sides of the ball. You don’t have to do it on every single collision, obviously, and no team wins every single collision in every moment of the game. It’s just that the very best teams win most of the really important ones.

First, from an attacking perspective, I think the following sentence about sums it up; we didn’t produce much high-quality ball through the forwards, our midfield offered almost nothing at all from a carrying perspective and, even then, we weren’t executing well enough from #10 to compensate.

Carbery’s rustiness is to be expected. This was his first start this season and only his seventh appearance for Munster since January 2019. He’s played 4 times for Ireland in that time. Hamstring and ankle issues have limited him to around 11 games in a 12-month span and it showed in this game. So some of his lines were a bit off, some of his pass execution was poor and his pass options were sub-optimal. Nothing overtly shocking there but it was noticeable.

Here’s one example;

Loughman is stepping on his ideal passing line to O’Donoghue here but I think Joey Carbery with four or five starts under his belt threads this needle to put the player away into the gap.

But it’s when you add that set of conditions to the poor quality ball being produced upfront and from midfield that you end up with a recipe for poor ball retention and handing over a lot of transitions to an Ulster side that are really good at taking advantage of transition events.

Here’s a good example. Remember this from the Leinster game?

Here’s a very similar moment.

A lineout in and around halfway and the 10m line, a hit up in midfield, a lost collision and then a penalty conceded for coming from the side to try and recover the ruck. Should Arnold have got the ball here? Maybe not. But when he takes the short ball from Carbery he has a one on one with Luke Marshall where, if we win the collision, we’d have a point of access to the Ulster 22.

McCloskey isn’t joined to the contact so if we can dominate this contact point we’ll be off to the races. Stack gainline wins on top of gainline wins and you’ll stress any defence. We didn’t do that enough in this game.

I’ll be criticising our midfield in this game but I should make it clear that they were far from the only players losing offensive collisions in this game. On my watch back of the game, I began to notice a few trends.

Losing offensive contact points in wide areas. We’re talking getting stopped on the gain line. We’re talking about getting dragged into touch from the 5m hash. We’re ultimately talking about playing a lot of second layer ball without establishing a legitimate threat beyond the initial line of our forwards.

Ulster didn’t fear our ability to hurt them at the edge.

So when we went into the second layer – and we did this quite a bit – it made our work there pressured and more vulnerable to getting numbered up quite easily. Essentially, if their wide defenders don’t have the physical threat of the carry to cluster their defensive positions, your passing and accuracy have to be top drawer and all too often, it wasn’t.

This play is a good example. Watch Ulster’s wide defenders track our movements on Scannell, Arnold and Earls like for like as the ball moves across the field.

The passing wasn’t exactly what it needed to be here either – Scannell’s pass to Arnold was slightly behind him and Earls offload to Goggin was way off – but we’re always playing into ever-decreasing space and by the time Goggin gets the ball he’s working in less than 5m of space with two players closing on him.

When we did manage to get a defensive cluster at the edge, our skillset let us down. After Coombes pinches in two edge defenders, Daly puts O’Mahony and Earls away with Cloete keeping width on the touchline.

This combination can’t get the job done. O’Mahony’s pass is too deep and the communication between himself and Earls isn’t what it needed to be.

Everywhere you look in this game, you see poor execution under situational pressure in that second layer.

Why are we throwing a fat, wobbling 15m skip pass to a front-row forward when a simpler pass to Carbery opens up an isolation opportunity on Stockdale?

We want players to express themselves in attacking situations but this was just a bad passing option in my opinion.

Throw in some inaccuracy at the breakdown and you have all the components of a Very Tough Day At The Office. Here’s an example of an exit that we overcomplicated initially and then compounded into a loss of three points.

The chattering nonsense box on Eir Sports blamed this on Keynan Knox, for some odd reason, but it’s the slow cleanout from Loughman and then Scannell that really hurts it. Keep in mind that this came almost immediately after recovering from a bad restart in the direct aftermath of our first try and you can see how the coaches might see this as a frustrating own goal.

We had the majority of the possession in this game. We had more carries, we made more passes but we consistently failed to hurt Ulster on the gainline at key moments.

This was not a problem that Ulster had.

Stuart McCloskey won man of the match on the night and rightly so. He was the key player in this game. He has 24 interactions with the ball and almost every single one of them brought Ulster onto the front foot.

Ulster had already crept ahead by the 31st minute thanks to an excellent converted try off a poor kick transition that was a combination of a poor kick from Daly and then an even worse reset off the centre-field ruck position.

A silly high tackle from Loughman – it happens, but too often as a collective – gave Ulster cheap access to our 5m line and, after collapsing a maul, Ulster chose to go to a scrum given the pressure we’d manage to exert on their lineout.

Here’s the result.

BANG. He’s through Rory Scannell’s tackle like it isn’t even there. We just about managed to stop this initial linebreak and conceded a penalty a few phases later. From the resulting scrum, Iain Henderson – another man who had a big, big game – made a massive gain off the first ruck and from the resulting scramble under the posts, Ulster could afford to just swing the ball wide because they knew that space would have to be there if Munster were compressed under the posts.

That’s what happens when you get multiple 5m scrum positions and players who can win gain line for you. Sure, we aren’t spaced perfectly as we head out – Earls has to stick on Marshall because he doesn’t know that Carbery will get there – but it caused by the field position and the won gain line. And McCloskey won plenty of that.

He won collisions, he offloaded, he stuck our defenders. When Ulster ran into trouble up the middle of the field, McCloskey was a key release player for them.

And when it came to big, decisive collisions he won what needed to be one.

Darren O’Shea won’t be wanting to look back at this moment – or many moments at all from this game to be honest – but it’s an illustration of how Ulster hurt us.

Their third try was a key illustration of that. It essentially came off first phase. McCloskey made a big bust off the lineout and then Munster’s spacing started to fall away under pressure.

Loughman and Botha are a little passive on the second phase and O’Shea’s is in a real bind when it comes to the linebreak. McCloskey plays a key part in it.

When McCloskey comes onto the ball, O’Shea’s focus needs to be mostly on Rea but he’s not backing O’Donoghue to make the stop on McCloskey. O’Shea steps in on McCloskey and, when the ball goes to Rea, he goes through without a hand being laid on him for a decisive score.

Disappointing. But it’s the kind of thing that can happen when you stack gainline win ontop of gainline win before hitting the seam spaces for big breaks.

That space was a rich hunting ground for Ulster and when they hit it right, we struggled to stop them.

Our centre-field defence was pretty good. Our attacking lineout was pretty good too, even if we didn’t have much to threaten Ulster with from Q2/Q3. Our scrum was very strong especially on Ulster’s put in.

But our phase play, seam defence and, most importantly of all, our ability to win key collisions let us down badly.

This was a full-strength Ulster side, bar Coetzee and Murphy. The guys were missing both through enforced rotation (Stander, Kleyn, Farrell), chosen rotation (Holland, Haley and Archer) and injury (Beirne, O’Byrne, Marshall, Cronin, Hanrahan and O’Donnell, perhaps) hurt our ability to compete with Ulster in key areas. Even with those eleven players added to the matchday 23, we’d have been under pressure from McCloskey and Henderson in the same areas but I think we might have handled it better. That said, all the sides have had to deal with enforced rotation this festive season so it’s a balancing act that we haven’t been able to get right.

Van Graan rightly selected Stander, Kleyn and Farrell to start in Connacht with in-conference points at stake but that meant that three of most important gainline winners and defensive stoppers would be unavailable for the next two games.

The frustrating thing is that a lot of our second layer players haven’t really been able to take the opportunities that came their way. Darren O’Shea, Sam Arnold, Nick McCarthy, Neil Cronin, and even guys like Chris Cloete just haven’t performed. In this game, they weren’t helped by deeply sub-par performances from the senior players but their individual underperformances are still an issue.

We badly miss our test players collectively. When they play, we’re still an incomplete side, but we at least resemble the team that finished top four in Europe three seasons running closer than we did here. The depth of the squad behind those test players in certain positions is a real issue but that’s been there for a few years now. Ball carriers are an issue, even at full tilt, and until that is resolved fully (in the tight five, midfield and back row) we will always have issues with our attack when our halfbacks and other creative players have off days.

Circumstance, a few catch 22s and the creeping feeling that some players are reaching the end of the road with this club are hitting Munster hard at the moment, especially as we head into the latter stages of a difficult 13-week block of games.

Cardiff Blues (A) – W (Cat 2 v Cat 2 Selection)
Ulster (H) – W (Cat 1 v Cat 1 Selection)
Ospreys (A) – W (Cat 1 v Cat 1 Selection)
Racing (H) – D (Cat 1 v Cat 1 Selection)
Edinburgh (H) – L (Cat 2 v Cat 1 Selection)
Saracens (H) – W (Cat 1 v Cat 2 Selection)
Saracens (A) – L (Cat 1 v Cat 1 Selection)
Connacht (A) – W (Cat 1.5 v Cat 1 Selection)
Leinster (H) – L (Cat 2 v Cat 2 Selection)
Ulster (A) – L (Cat 1.5 v Cat 1 Selection)

We’ve won five of the eleven games so far, drawn won and lost five. We’ve won two of the last six games. So, pressure. The coaches know it. The players know it. Paris awaits with the European season on the line. Racing will know where to hurt us on this week’s display and how quickly we can fix our issues – and if we can fix them – will determine our European season in the next week.

The Wally Ratings: Ulster (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.

Names	Rating
Dave Kilcoyne	★★
Niall Scannell	★★
Keynan Knox	★★★
Fineen Wycherley	★★★
Darren O'Shea	★
Peter O'Mahony	★★
Jack O'Donoghue	★★
Arno Botha	★★
Conor Murray	★★
Joey Carbery	★★
Keith Earls	★
Rory Scannell	★
Sam Arnold	★
Andrew Conway	★★
Shane Daly	★★★★
Diarmuid Barron	★★★
Jeremy Loughman	★★
John Ryan	★★
Gavin Coombes	★★★★
Jack O'Sullivan	★★★
Neil Cronin	★★★
Dan Goggin	★★★
Chris Cloete	★

Notable Players

Very few players came out of this game with credit.

This was the worst I’ve seen Keith Earls play in some time. He gave away a needless cheap penalty in the first half and was completely unable to influence the game in a positive way. A few times when he got the ball on the outside I half expected him to back his pace on the outside but he just… didn’t. Poor.

A lot of that comes down to the chain of possession coming from inside, where I felt Rory Scannell and Sam Arnold had really poor outings. They lost collisions, weren’t able to project themselves in key moments and saw the game pass them by when it came to executing their skillset, albeit on the back foot for the most part.

Darren O’Shea had a really poor game, for me. He started well enough but as the game went on his effectiveness dropped and he started falling off tackles, making poor reads and knocking the ball in contact. Not one to remember.

On the positive side, I felt Fineen Wycherley and Keynan Knox had good games. Wycherley’s evening was truncated but I thought that Knox scrummaged really strongly and looked like a guy with a bit of threat about him in the close-in, heavy exchanges.

Shane Daly was our best back by quite a distance. He was solid under the high ball, tracked the play well and looked like a player that could make something happen with the ball in hand.

Another quality outing for Daly. It’s becoming something of a habit and, at this point, I’d start him in Paris next week ★★★★

My top performer was Gavin Coombes. He’s 6’4″. He weighs around 110kg. He’s a guy who was powdering hardened English Championship professionals in the Celtic Cup final when he was 20 years of age. He’s a guy who should be playing BIG, and I thought he certainly did that in this one. He came off the bench for Fineen Wycherley after 30 minutes and, for me, was our standout forward. Coombes had so many involvements.

He racked up big ruck numbers, contested the lineout, mauled well on both sides of the ball, scrummaged in the second row and, most importantly, got his hands on the ball and started committing some defenders.

He showed good animation when he wasn’t in possession and was able to move the ball out of contact with a bit of subtlety.

Coombes showed that he’s a guy that can be trusted with way more minutes this season, especially when we’re lacking in guys that can reliably threaten the opposition line. Quality, even in defeat. ★★★★