I want you to look at this still from the coverage of this game and drink it in. Understand what it means. It’s a selection of some of Leinster’s senior players – the guys they rested en-masse for this game – having the absolute time of their lives as they watched lads so far below them on the Leinster depth chart that they can barely see them take the lead over a flailing, shaken Munster side at the Aviva Stadium.
A few minutes later during a break in play, the TV director would pan to other members of that senior Leinster squad as if to highlight just how many of them were sitting in the stands and how it didn’t matter one iota to the result. We badly needed a win – a bonus-point win, no less – in this game and, instead, we shipped our second bonus-point loss to Leinster in two months. But this wasn’t the same as Black Saturday in Thomond Park. This was actually a fair bit worse. In that game, we were humiliated and embarrassed in front of our own fans by a Leinster side featuring test Lions and multi-cap internationals. In this latest indignity, we were beaten by a squad of players that Leinster might select to take on the Dragons during a test window.
And they beat us out the gate.
This is not the end of the season but it felt like it might as well have been. We go on to a quarter-final up in the Kingspan against Ulster and you know what? We might even win that. Either way, if we keep winning we’ll probably have to play against a full-strength Leinster at some stage, most likely, so what reason do I have – that makes sense – that says we could beat that team? I don’t have any. On the evidence of the last two games, just 7 weeks apart, they would beat us by 30 points if they could be arsed. If.
That’s where we are right now.
In the intro to the Red Eye this week I wrote the following;
At a fundamental level, Leinster – players, coaches and staff – do not rate Munster as we are currently constructed. Not even a little bit. Forget everything that will be said about Munster by Leo Cullen this week or in the weeks to come should we play them again. To Leo Cullen and Stuart Lancaster, we are Connacht+.
Believe that, because they do.
The team they have selected here is not one that they fully expect to beat a full-strength Munster side but they would be pretty confident that the addition of one or two key players in key areas would be enough to tip the balance back in their favour. That is how confident they are that they have the exact measure of us, down to the picogram.
As it turns out, they didn’t need one of their Big Six players to beat us because remember, they know that we’re Connacht+. They have Johann Van Graan’s Munster weighed and measured like a bag of pork chops. They think they know us and… they do. They know we are Connacht+. As soon as we know that and accept it, we’ll be on the road to being better that whatever we were in this game.
In a way, that this performance happened in the same stadium where, just two weeks ago on Saturday, Munster pushed Toulouse right to the edge in front of 40,000 Munster fans who travelled from all over Ireland and Europe to be there is… oddly refreshing?
There can be no illusions now. Like a bucket of cold water waking you from a deep sleep, this performance was a reminder of where we actually are at the moment – unable to beat a team in the Aviva that I can honestly say, would probably have lost to Ulster or Connacht, and probably three of the South African teams.
And we, in all likelihood, would beat all of those teams if it came down to it but right now when we see Leinster jerseys, we are beaten before we take the field. You could put out a Leinster team even more callow and inexperienced than this – if they even have one – and this Munster side as selected would genuinely struggle unless literally everything went their way right from the kickoff.
If that makes you angry, congratulations.
It means you still care.
♛ ♛ ♛
The reaction to this defeat can be viewed logically, emotionally and tactically.
Logically, I know that nobody wants to play badly in a game like this. I also know that the coaches and (most of) the players who played so incredibly poorly in this game will be hurting as bad as Munster fans will be for the next two weeks. If the performances since Black Saturday went a long way to erasing the bad memories of that day back at the start of April, this game brought all of those bad memories back with a bang. It’s a bit like having a nightmare that you turned up to school with no pants on and then waking up from that nightmare only to realise that you fell asleep in school with no pants on. It’s a never-ending Mobius strip of pure, uncut, weapons-grade misery but again, logically, I know that nobody went out there to play badly and embarrass themselves, the club and the fans in this fashion.
It happened and that’s that. The season is not done and they will have to somehow pick themselves up for a quarter-final in Ulster. Don’t ask me how they do that but do it they must.
I also know that, logically, the trust and goodwill built since Toulouse has completely evaporated in 80 short minutes and that it will take months to rebuild. That said, it could be rebuilt in an instant if Munster could beat Leinster in a semi-final if we can somehow beat Ulster in two weeks, but logically, there’s no reason to think that can happen under this coaching team and with this squad as we are currently constructed.
There just isn’t. It doesn’t mean it won’t happen or can’t happen – nothing is impossible – I just can’t tell you how this Munster side could do it right now. If they can’t beat a Leinster B team shorn of every single one of their top tier internationals with a home semi-final on the line, what hope do they have of doing it in a knockout game against an infinitely stronger Leinster side?
I’d back us to beat anyone else. Seriously. I think we’d beat La Rochelle, Toulouse, even or Saracens sooner than we would even a rotated Leinster side at this stage. For whatever reason, when it comes to Leinster we seem to be broken. It’s the only logical thing to take from the last two games and for the same reason, why you should assume that nothing will change in the short term.
Emotionally, the fact that this result played out as it did makes me absolutely furious. I could try to cod you right now and pretend like I’m a detached observer from all of this but I’m not. This matters to me. Maybe it shouldn’t. I’m seven seasons into this. It should just be a job to me at this stage but unfortunately, I’m still hurt by performances like this. I know that when I’m not, I’ll probably quit.
Seeing great men of this province like Keith Earls walking around the place like this during the game – it hurts me to see that.
Why was he shaking his head in this instance?
Well, because tactically I think he could feel the game slipping away from us even then. In this particular instance, a cross-field kick that had been aimed at him by Joey Carbery had just sailed over his head by around two metres. Keep in mind that the context of this play is that we’ve just gone three points down to a Leinster B team and there are five minutes left in the half.
Carbery donks the kick into the stands regardless but the thinking behind the play was just muddy and procedural, without the pieces in play to make it happen, even if everything went as planned.
Even if Earls takes this kick – which is an incredibly difficult kick to land given the spacing – I’d still back Leinster to either get hands-on him as the ball transits, push him into touch or, because our support players are so recessed to create the edge in the first place, concede a penalty the minute the ball hits the deck. There’s a multi-verse where Earls takes this on the run, beats the first defender, steps the full-back and then races under the posts but it’s the same one where RG Snyman has been fit for the last two seasons, COVID never happened and I won the lottery so if you find out how to get there, let me know.
It’s indicative of a form of panic. We were down on the scoreboard – unexpectedly, you might say, but certainly deservedly – after a series of poor moments on both sides of the ball.
Poor, panicked attack leads to chaotic moments which translate into hurried, snatched decisions and then we’re reacting to a transition event of our own and struggling for shape.
In the aftermath of that, we went looking for a low percentage play that wasn’t really on to play catchup and sent a kick sailing over Earls’ head.
We had an even better opportunity a few minutes later when we took another long kickback from Leinster and actually managed to break free on transition. It didn’t work out and, even with a man in the bin, I had a real feeling coming up to halftime that we wouldn’t be winning this game.
Leinster didn’t rate our maul at this stage so they could afford to leave Baird to swipe over the top to attack the ball transfer. They focused their power stopper – McCarthy – onto Kleyn and we couldn’t adjust. We scored straight from the kickoff in the second half, pretty much, with the high ball again proving useful but it was as much to do with luck as anything else. Outside of the high bomb, we didn’t really have all that much else to stress Leinster with. After three years under Larkham… well, you know yourself what that says.
We had a 20-phase sequence of possession towards the end of the game – when we were looking for a try that would see us slide into fourth because it would provide two losing bonus points – that sums up a lot of where we are. We were down to 14 when Thomas Ahern went off for an HIA after Kleyn and Kendellen had been injured and with two hookers on the field
When Soroka conceded a penalty for not rolling away, we decided to stop play to take the penalty but then we quick tapped anyway because we were down a forward so scrummaging or close-range maul driving was unlikely to produce the platform we needed to score a try.
A few phases later, we worked into a decent position but when it came to it, we snatched at a pass across the gap, the pass was off target, Jack Daly had to readjust to take it and got smashed into touch by Osbourne, injuring himself fairly badly in the process.
You could oscillate back and forward on who deserves the lion’s share of the blame for this result and the attached performance. The players – especially our starting halfbacks – were really poor here. Murray and Carbery were at their lowest ebb as a partnership in a while and by that, specifically, I mean their play calling, their execution and the quality of their progressions across the field. Carbery seemed like he just did not want to use Goggin as an offensive option so a lot of the play flowed through Chris Farrell, who had a good game in my opinion, but that seemed to limit our options and make life simpler for Leinster. Even then, Goggin seemed to be a wider option most of the time as opposed to a central passing/carrying platform. That fell to Mike Haley, who acted as an auxiliary playmaker of sorts here but I’m not sure we were any more threatening as a result.
I just don’t think that – playmaking – is his game when push comes to shove. He scored a nice try, don’t get me wrong, but given that we were, according to Van Graan and Larkham’s selection patterns, playing with our #1 scrumhalf, flyhalf and fullback combination it was illuminating to see how ad hoc and out of sync we were for large stretches of our attacking possession.
We rarely managed to stress Leinster outside of transition events stemming from Leinster errors. When we did have long stretches of possession, we were hamstrung by a lack of legitimate ball-carrying options and thinking that ranged from panicked pass snatching and overprescribed structure ball that hasn’t ever worked in a big game.
This is a good example.
How often have you seen that scrum stack in a big game? How many times has it ended any differently than this, with runners outnumbered by defenders and heading up cul de sacs? You might say “What about the next phase? Isn’t this a three-phase strike play?”. Within two phases we were back to slinging shortcut passes to the edge and looking for offloads in cluttered contact points.
Ultimately, I think we lack imagination, especially against a team like Leinster who know us better than we know ourselves. We showed them nothing that they haven’t schemed for us ten times in a row over the last few years. Leinster can predict our team weeks in advance and our plays phases in advance. Until we surprise them off the field, we will never catch them on the field.
Our attacking work is the exact opposite of “surprising”. It’s not bad, it’s not even close to how bad it’s portrayed but, ultimately, it’s not good enough to worry Leinster.
Our forwards pass well in an integrated 3-2-X but most of those passes aren’t as threatening as they should be because they are formulaic. The Wycherley brothers – one duff pass from Fineen aside – pass really well but what good is that if they pass to Carbery on the swing and Leinster don’t have to worry about the inside break because that part of Carbery’s game doesn’t seem to be there anymore?
It’s a pass for nothing that doesn’t create space and just leads to more shortcut passes that lead to nothing. If the service they get from #9 is slower than it needs to be and the player they screen for can’t create inside compressions on that screen, what does that mean for the outside attackers? It means blue jerseys swallowing them up, forever.
Our attacking work seems to be the most expansive scheme we’re willing to run with the players that we have at our disposal but I wonder if it’s not now critically undermined by our selection policy. Sure, we have injuries, but we seem to be running a 3-2-X system that wants to double down on options, pace and tempo but when push comes to shove we have consistently selected Conor Murray and Joey Carbery at halfback. Murray is an excellent player. The best Irish scrumhalf there’s ever been and a genuine legend of the province but if he’s lost his place at Ireland level because the Irish system has to run quicker at the ruck point, why are we selecting Murray to start all of our big games and play 75% of them when we are less collision dominant than Ireland and more dependent on speed of service, which has dipped in Murray’s game since 2019/20.
This isn’t about Conor Murray. He is who he is and I guarantee if you slotted him into Saracens, Montpellier or Bordeaux he would improve them but he seems miscast in the system we, in theory, look to be running.
For me, Murray is most effective as a kicker in a kick pressure starter team with heavy runners to interplay with off #9 and a separated backline that he can sling wider passes to from a solid, planted base. Yet we’re playing a hugely integrated game that puts a tonne of width on most of our sequences and wondering why Murray isn’t up with the pace of play or, when he gets to the ruck, that his passing degrades as a sequence goes on.
At what point is this a selection issue rather than a player problem? And vice versa? Our system looks to be crying out for a tempo #9 but, instead, we’ve used Casey as a guy to finish games from 60 minutes when, for the most part, we’ve been transitioning to a bench that is less collision dominant than the starting pack. You could say that Casey has struggled to break free of ruck gravity in big games but I’d say that, while that’s true, our ability to create dominant collision points degrades as the game goes on so, by 60 minutes against bigger teams, we’d be better suited to what Murray brings but, by that stage, he’s on the bench.
This is a microcosm of where we are at the moment – besieged by gotchas and catch-22s. Have to start Carbery because he’s the #1 guy and, in theory, the guy who should be driving us on so we probably should pair Murray with him to help cover for aspects of our defensive pattern but, as a result, teams are targeting Murray’s edge and making big gains (like Toulouse and Leinster did at the weekend). Our attacking patterns off #9 and beyond are plagued by slow ball and poor pass quality so we need to double down on our kicking game which is the only thing that produces results against Leinster so we have to start Murray because he’s our best “kicking #9”. All this while we’re dealing with injuries to core players like Snyman, Beirne, Coombes, O’Mahony and De Allende with force multipliers like Zebo, Hodnett and Kilcoyne also sitting at home healing up.
Carbery is an excellent player who we seem to be running in a system that is the exact opposite of what would suit him. For me, Carbery can’t be the sole handler in a backline as integrated as we’re running because it anchors him to that first receiver slot, often behind a screen, where things like his pass quality and static handling are put into focus because he can’t break around a screen. Leinster can flood him because they aren’t worried about his break back inside.
So you’d say unhinge him from that responsibility – allow him to float from the position and rotate others in as a primary handler – but you can’t do that either because we either need them to win collisions for us (De Allende/Farrell or Goggin in this instance) or they are sub-elite playmakers in the first place like Mike Haley so everything grinds to a halt against a good defence.
All that leads to what you see with Munster passing in a line or looking to throw offload parties to find space because everything will naturally fall flat if Carbery is the only playmaker. We look to change that mid-game by moving Carbery to fullback and Healy to #10 off the bench but that can’t be a core strategy because we only ever look to finish games like that the odd time when we’re chasing a result, we never, ever start games like that. That’s why it looks so janky and disorganised with no real structure to it – we don’t play a true double-playmaker system most of the time so why should it suddenly start working off the bench in a big game when we’re chasing the game?
Ultimately, Leinster have us well scouted and without most of our Big Six players, they did what they almost always do over the last five years – beat us out the gate while pulling up.
It’s not good enough but it is what we have become accustomed to. Toulouse was great, life-affirming and all that but we still lost. You feel pride, of course, but when that game is backed up by this it immediately sours everything, like you were an eejit for forgetting the reality of the last few years for two weeks.
Something has to change but will it?
I don’t think Van Graan and Larkham are for changing at this stage barring injury. We are where we are now because of things that were put in motion back in July of last year. Beset by injuries, a lack of clarity and what seems like a mental block that, if asked in a presser, no one will admit to but everyone knows is there, Munster fell to the worst defeat of the season and the worst finish in the league since 2015/16.
The season isn’t done by any means but this loss and the manner of it will take some getting over. Change is badly needed at this stage and, thankfully, it’s coming soon but the scale of the job ahead looks to be massive. We could still win something this season but as long as the road to a trophy runs through this Leinster side, the way we’ve been driving against them for the last few years would suggest that unless we’ve got all of our Big Six on the field, we’ll get walloped and, even then, you’d be surprised if we weren’t walloped.
Tough times.
The Wally Ratings: Leinster (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 |
|---|---|
| Josh Wycherley | ★★ |
| Niall Scannell | ★ |
| John Ryan | ★★ |
| Jean Kleyn | ★★ |
| Thomas Ahern | ★★ |
| Fineen Wycherley | ★★ |
| Alex Kendellen | ★★★ |
| Jack O'Donoghue | ★★ |
| Conor Murray | ★ |
| Joey Carbery | ★ |
| Keith Earls | ★★★ |
| Dan Goggin | ★★ |
| Chris Farrell | ★★★ |
| Andrew Conway | ★★ |
| Mike Haley | ★★ |
| Diarmuid Barron | ★★★ |
| Jeremy Loughman | ★★★ |
| Keynan Knox | ★★★ |
| Jason Jenkins | ★★★ |
| Jack Daly | N/A |
| Paddy Patterson | N/A |
| Ben Healy | N/A |
| Rory Scannell | N/A |
