There’s been more snide talk about “evolution” around Munster Rugby in the last few months than the first few reviews of The Origin Of Species.

I’ve found it difficult to parse what “evolution” actually means other than “win big games, duh” but I know I’m being deliberately unkind there. If taken as a good faith argument, the attacking evolution that is spoken about regarding Munster is a need for an attacking system that can create and convert chances in a way that will scale up to beat the very best teams in Europe. In the past number of years – especially against Leinster in PRO14 knock out games, which tend to sit longer in the memory – our work with the ball in hand has failed to impact beyond the immediate aftermath of the returns we got from kick pressure.

My point on this is, and always has been, that any style change of substance takes time. Any team – and I mean any team – can just start throwing the ball around and get a few highlight-reel scores and even a few wins but if you want to build a team that actually wants to win trophies while playing an expanded, expansive style of play it takes time.

A lot of time. It isn’t enough to just be able to hit teams off the set piece with a tight strike move, you have to have a set piece that can stack up to whoever you play to allow you the platform to do so. You have to have collision winners that can give you a platform to play off, or a system that is designed to work around that, which is way easier written about than done  – believe me. You have to develop a kicking game that can handle the strategic needs of the elite game and change as and when required.

You have to blend all of these needs with a strength and fitness regime that allows you to play the way you want to play for 90 minutes. Yes, ninety. It’s not enough to blow teams out of the water for 40 minutes and then hang onto your hat for the second half. That isn’t winning rugby, that is Sizzle Reel Rugby. Few pundits know the difference.

How many times have you seen Bristol praised to the rooftops for “playing the right way” when they lose every game of substance put in front of them? Even Harlequins, who are a better attacking side than Bristol, are an incomplete side in my opinion that will find it difficult to firefight their way against the bigger teams in Europe, in my opinion. Doing it against Bristol – the most inefficient side I’ve seen in the last few years – and a flagging Exeter side is one thing, doing it against the likes of Leinster, Toulouse, Racing, even Saracens as they are currently constructed, or La Rochelle is another story. Maybe I’ll be surprised this year but, in my opinion, elite rugby is so complex that any changes in style have to be incremental and complete because underdeveloped areas of your game will be ruthlessly punished.

I think Charles Darwin wrote something about that very process, actually.

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There are no medals handed out for beating a pretty strong Scarlets side in Llanelli in October.

I wish there were because if any performance deserved such a medal, it would be this one. A heavily rotated Munster selection absolutely battered a Scarlets side with multiple internationals and returning Lions away from home. This was no fluke. This was no freak result full of intercepts, dodgy refereeing or any other distortion that can sometimes suggest that the scoreboard and reality bear no relation to each other.

This was an old school pumping, not just in the scrum, not just in the lineout, but everywhere. The quality of our attacking work, in particular, blew the Scarlets away to the point that they looked shellshocked around the hour mark. That isn’t to say that the Scarlets turned into a bad side overnight – they didn’t – and that’s the point.

I wrote before the game that; 

The weather is expected to be pretty nice, actually – makes a change for Llanelli, to be fair – so we are expecting to ball and ball quite hard.

And I think we’ll need to if we want to come away with a win against a pretty strong Scarlets lineup. 

Reader, they balled quite hard. 

Any attack worth building will be deeply complex and work to provide consistent pictures for your playmakers to make decisions on. This takes time to build. Other attacking systems run on quite heavily scripted setups and individual targeting – Bristol spring to mind here – but what Munster are trying to build is a system that works with the players we have and are likely to have over the next number of years.

There’s always an element of guesswork involved with this because we can’t know exactly what Munster are planning in-house but we can look at who we sign and develop and how that develops on-field.

I think we’re looking to develop a Ruck Point Attack – among other things. Before I get to that, let’s have a look at some of the stuff we’re doing on transition and our transition into phase play schemes. There’s real imagination and variety building here;

Gavin Coombes ran the same line on transition against the Stormers and Sharks to get that forward overload, so this wasn’t a one-time thing, either. Look at how much Healy has grown from a decision making and execution perspective on these phases!

But this is not what a Ruck Point Attack is. Ruck Point Attack looks to use action in and around the breakdown as a means to create and preserve space, like a bubble moving along a pipe. What you do with that spacing is up to you, especially when you look to combine the action with deep-lying runners and varied attacking shapes, as Munster did pretty regularly here.

One of the best examples of the process can be seen in this breakdown transition sequence;

The action of Snyman at the base of the ruck creates workable space as the defence reacts to his action on the ball. It’s a small part of a wider, more complex organism that involves a lot of moving parts. There’s no “one neat trick” to what Munster have been trying to build. It’s not a formation or a gimmick, it’s something way more involved than that with the action of the #9 being a crucial component.

A scrumhalf capable of making breaks and selling that narrow threat is a key component of this scheme and you can see how it seems to be built around what Craig Casey does incredibly well. When you look at the other options in the position – Cronin, Osbourne, Patterson and even Coughlan – they all fit the archetype. Where that leaves Conor Murray remains to be seen on his return.

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Offensively, we took apart the Scarlets from almost our first possession.

The 50/22 off a centre-field scrum was a particularly well-done bit of analysis executed perfectly in-game.

The second scrum isn’t intrinsically linked to the first 50/22 but it’s the sign of a well-coached side with a bit of deep thinking going on behind the scenes and players who aren’t afraid to take chances. Healy’s pass to the open man and Nash’s electric break – on Steff Evans, no less – were really special moments of players seeing chances, taking chances and converting chances.

That isn’t any outside backline that Munster are slicing up here – that’s Jon Davies and Steff Evans.

That offensive performance was backed up by a seriously physical defensive display that denied Scarlets any kind of momentum.

We also bullied them at the lineout and on maul D – I’ll look at that in the GIF Room this week – while putting in a scrummaging performance of the highest quality against a very experienced, high-quality Scarlets front row.

The scoreline doesn’t fully reflect the balance of the game because this could and should have been 50 points plus. That’s how dominant Munster were here. What does it mean for the rest of the season? There’s no way of knowing for sure right now but what this game does show is that we have a confident group of players capable of winning and winning big on the road against tough opposition. That people are now talking about the Scarlets being in a need of a deep transition is a testament to the quality of this performance.

So why do I feel so flat after it? RG Snyman. I just can’t untether the high of this result from the horrible injury to RG that will see him out for the foreseeable future after he re-ruptured his ACL. After he worked so hard and so long to recover from the injury seven minutes into his debut only to injure it again nine minutes into this game taking a restart is beyond cruel but that’s the game we play.

If it’ll take 8 months to recover, that would bring us to May 2022 – exactly when trophies are won. What better way to honour RG than by giving him some winning rugby to look at while he rehabs?

That has to be the aim now, to back up the potential this result and performance hinted at.

Notable Players

There were no poor performances here, that almost goes without saying. I’ll focus on the Five Star performers here and go over the rest in the Five Star Podcast but I wanted to give special mention to Ben Healy first and foremost.

This season, I wanted to see if Ben Healy was capable of ascending to a level where he could dominate games, not just off the tee but with his mind and skillset. Being the primary playmaker for a team is as much an intellectual challenge as it is a physical one and this was the best I’ve seen Healy play as a senior player.

His nuke of a right boot was there from hand, of course, but look at the confidence he had in his handling. The margins on this pass were tight but Healy’s rolling here and making plays.

He saw the chance, he took the chance, he broke the game wide open. This Ben Healy is a guy with the capacity to scale up to be the main man for Munster. He’s not all there yet but this game showed a glimpse of what Healy could be. Commanding. ★★★★★

Calvin Nash has been waiting for a statement performance and this was it. The talent has always been there for Calvin Nash – he’s always been an outstanding athlete with a  fast-twitch gear change – but bringing it all together has been a challenge; until this game. Nash absolutely shredded a serious operator in Steff Evans on both sides of the ball.

Not very many players make Steff Evans look like a concrete bollard but that’s what Nash did here, repeatedly. Electric. ★★★★★

Fineen Wycherley dominated this game. Full stop. He called a superb lineout, broke guys up at the breakdown, and scrummaged really strongly on the tighthead side of the scrum for the majority of the game. This was the kind of performance that makes coaches of all levels sit up and take notice because he did everything to a really high standard and for 80 minutes too. Dominant. ★★★★★

When Chris Cloete plays like this, he’s literally unplayable. He was a primary ball carrier, he won more turnovers at the breakdown than the entirety of the Scarlets team combined.

When the Gunshow is on, like he was here, he turns games almost all on his own and could arguably the best jackal in the game. Game changer. ★★★★★

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The Wally Ratings: Scarlets (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
Jeremy Loughman	★★★★
Diarmuid Barron	★★★★
Stephen Archer	★★★★
Thomas Ahern	★★★★
Fineen Wycherley	★★★★★
Jack O'Donoghue	★★★★
Chris Cloete	★★★★★
Jack O'Sullivan	★★★★
Neil Cronin	★★★★
Ben Healy	★★★★★
Shane Daly	★★★
Dan Goggin	★★★★
Liam Coombes	★★★★
Calvin Nash	★★★★★
Matt Gallagher	★★★
Kevin O'Byrne	★★★
Josh Wycherley	★★★★
John Ryan	★★★★
RG Snyman	N/A
Alex Kendellen	★★★
Paddy Patterson	★★★
Jack Crowley	★★★
Jack Daly	★★★