Munster 19 Leinster 34

Humiliation in Thomond Park

Make no mistake, this was a devastating defeat that will live long in the memory. Not just for the result, which was bad enough, but for the tame, neutered manner of the loss.

Match Quality

Match Intensity

Standard of Opposition

Match Importance

4.6

[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]T[/su_dropcap]echnically, Munster lost this game because we failed to impact Leinster in the two key areas we needed to impact to get a positive foothold in the game. Before the game I wrote that we needed to keep Leinster below 95% completion (at a bare minimum) at the breakdown and, failing that but ideally coupled with, getting them down to below 75% completion at the lineout.

If you can’t do either of those, you have to play with more possession and dominate territory and hope that Leinster have a higher error rate than normal on their own possessions.

When you can’t do any of these three things, you lose to Leinster every single time. Munster failed miserably on all three fronts here so, unsurprisingly, we were comprehensively beaten.

Don’t cod yourself with soft talk about how bad the referee was here. Yes, Christophe Ridley was dreadful and, worse again, dangerous, but as bad as he was, we were worse. He consistently showed us where the line was in this game and, when it came to it, we didn’t want to “go there”. Every player knows what it means to “go there”. When you go to that place in a game, it’s that extra 5% where you don’t care what happens to the opposition thanks to your actions.

Devin Toner saw Gavin Coombes making a poach here with his left leg planted, he came flying in from the side in front of the referee, lifted his right leg and drove through the planted left leg, which ended Coombes’ game and, perhaps, his season as predictably as you’d expect.

I saw people claiming that Devin Toner, a 35-year-old, 18 year pro with 346 senior caps wasn’t trying to take out Coombes here which is adorable, really. This isn’t his first or even his 300th rodeo. You can’t tell me that Devin Toner doesn’t know the consequences of that entry at that moment with Coombes’ planted over the ball. Toner does know, plainly. He’s not a rookie or a moron and if you want to pretend that he is, that’s cool, but I’m done dealing with fantasy. Toner knows exactly where the line is and was willing to “go there” to help Leinster win that ruck because he knows small things lead to big things. Whatever happens to you after the ruck? Well, that’s a you problem.

Do you know what was worse?

All of the senior players who watched this entry happen and did… absolutely nothing. Not then, not after.

You might be thinking “well, Loughman is there too isn’t he” and if that’s your first thought, as opposed to the guy making a lateral entry to a ruck directly in front of the ref where he drives all of his weight through onto the standing leg and increases the torque by lifting the other leg, you need to wake up.

Coombes would go off injured soon after and was seen in a moon boot after the game. Toner isn’t going in there thinking “this will break Coombes ankle, just like I planned”. It’s rarely as premeditated as that. He just doesn’t care what happens to him because he’s making that ruck entry from the side so he can stop Munster winning the penalty, he’s targeting the leg because that makes it easier and fuck you that’s why. Leinster do this in every serious game against Munster and every time they are allowed away with it through, either, the referee’s interpretation or our passivity or both. Every time that happens we get smashed on the field and then on the scoreboard.

And why?

Because we need the referee to do something for us to win. We need the ref to reward us at the breakdown consistently so we can get the platform we need to play our game. Leinster’s game just needs the referee to do nothing – to let almost anything go at the breakdown – and, most of the time, that’s exactly what happens. Referees don’t want to blow their whistle. The vast majority reward the team going forward in the scrum, in the maul, in the collisions and at the breakdown.

At the next ruck after Coombes’ injury, I am convinced that the Munster of old would have been dug into Devin Toner and any other guy wearing a blue shirt and left them something to remember them by after the game. What happened instead? Devin Toner and Josh Van Der Flier went flying off their feet AGAIN, and we just stood there and watched them do it.

The ref is watching them do it too, of course, but our reaction to this should have been to realise that this ref has no interest in refereeing the offensive breakdown and we need to take the game into our own hands. But that didn’t happen. We had an opportunity to stick a dud on Toner a few times throughout the game but that didn’t happen either.

My problem here isn’t with Devin Toner. He hates Munster – genuinely – and knows he’ll more than likely never have to play in Thomond Park ever again. Even then, he’s retiring at the end of the season anyway so who cares? He’ll retire into a handy existence where he’ll have media opportunities thrown into his lap in Dublin if he wants them and he can live the rest of his life firmly ensconced in the Leinster bubble. He doesn’t have to worry about making anything awkward up in Carton House – that’s a you problem, pal – and Leinster are all the better for it.

My problem is that Leinster were right over the edge all night long and instead of fighting fire with fire, we were bleating to the referee to do something. Look at Lowe driving Murray into the dirt here, coming up with an elbow in his mush, laughing in his face.

And we’re talking to the ref about this? Conor Murray asked the ref if he was checking this afterwards when he was being treated and the ref said “we’re always looking”. Good to know. Turns out we were always looking too – looking at our guys getting fucked around and doing nothing about it.

Where was our fight? 

I can guarantee you that if Stuart Hogg was to do the same thing to Conor Murray next week, Peter O’Mahony would be right over to get stuck in him and no mistake. Why does James Lowe get kid glove treatment? I can’t answer that. In truth, I don’t want to know.

What I do know is that Leinster went out to win the violence first and then focus on winning the rugby. We seemed too focused on the rugby part and, let’s be honest again, that naivety resulted in us getting bullied mercilessly at home in front of fans who paid nearly €2 a litre to drive to Limerick from all over the province. And then Leinster went and won the rugby anyway.

The last time Munster lost by this much to Leinster in Thomond Park was during the dog days of 2015/16. That was seen as something as a “spurring point” for things to change and the process that saw Rassie Erasmus brought in began in earnest soon after. We know change is coming on the coaching side – we’ve known that for a while, even if we don’t the who yet – but perhaps this game will be the spurring point for more radical changes to the on-field certainties that we’ve seen for the last decade.

It’s 11 years since we last won something and we never looked further away from breaking that streak as we did on Saturday night. If that’s not the spur for change, real change, then I don’t know what is.

♛ ♛ ♛

I’m a middle-aged, bald crackpot who’s been homeless on the streets of Dublin while writing on these very pages, who’s been so crazy I can’t tell dreams from reality and who has been poorer than you can ever imagine. I’ve been in homeless hostels in Dublin city centre on a Friday night where I’ve had to sleep with all of my property behind me to stop it from being stolen. I’ve been in worse shelters where I haven’t even been able to sleep because of how dangerous and drugged up the other “residents” were. I’ve been down to my last €5 note with no guarantee of ever getting another one from anywhere.

So I don’t know what it’s like to hit a ruck in an Interpro. Or be in a high-performance environment. But I do know what it’s like to be afraid, to stick to all the rules they say you’re supposed to and still lose anyway. The only way to get out of that slump is to harden up, break the rules and get out of the gravity of losing. That sounds quite LinkedIn but I don’t mean it to. I’ve seen people follow the rules into the dirt – I was one of them – and when that happens, all the appeals to authority to help you count for absolutely nothing. Every single time.

The only person who can help you is you.

When I watched Munster looking desperately for refereeing decisions on Saturday night while playing it “hard but fair” at the offensive breakdown and then watched Leinster fly in off their feet and from all angles to all the reward that brings, I saw myself, naive and impotently fumbling within the rules in the mid-2010s. That’s why it made me so mad, and while I’m still mad now.

These are good players and good guys who have had decent Munster and, for some, Irish careers. They plainly tried their guts out in this game. It’s not a case of giving 100% because they do that. What is lacking is that extra few percentage points against Leinster when, perhaps, you need to remember that the #TeamOfUs is really the #TeamOfThem+Pals. Why would Andy Farrell look at any senior Munster player during this game and think “yeah, I made a mistake keeping those guys on the bench during the Six Nations”?

They might be better than us right now – and they are – but does that mean we have to endure Caelan Doris talking about how enjoyable it was playing in Thomond Park? That isn’t us. That shouldn’t be us. It can’t be us.

Why should they, the players, listen to a crackpot like me, a blogger, a podcaster if they are reading this right now? Because I’ve been a loser my entire life.

Take it from me.

I only stopped losing when I stopped playing the game I always lost.

♛ ♛ ♛

When the referee’s interpretation of the breakdown went against us – a lot of heavy lifting in that first part of the sentence – we needed to impact Leinster at the lineout. One of the key trends in Leinster losses, when they do lose, is running at under 75% completion at the lineout. They ran at 92% here, winning 12 of their 13 lineouts and they used that platform to consistently isolate and compress the space around Joey Carbery.

It was vital that we attacked Leinster in the air to prevent them from launching these compression loop screens but we were consistently undone by a lack of cohesion and alertness on the counter-launch. Part of this comes down to injury – I think we intended to use Coombes as a counter-launching half-lock on these schemes but, with Cloete selected to compensate for Beirne’s absence at the breakdown and Kendellen – a heavy wing forward – replacing Coombes early on, we were going to struggle for size in the air, given that none of our starting props would have the heft to regularly lift Jenkins. Instead, Jenkins would be mostly used as a powerlifter himself to, it must be said, very poor effect.

And there were quite a few more examples just like this where Munster failed to get into the air because of guys blowing their lines or because we stayed packed in for a maul defence that never came.

With that clean line of possession, Leinster were able to repeatedly launch effective attacks that would have gone almost exactly as they would have laid out beforehand. It was, in truth, way too easy and “tough day at the office, we go again” just won’t cut it after what was, if we’re being honest, an abject humiliation by a 3/4 strength Leinster side.

A chastening night that will live long in the memory. Or should, at least.

Notable Players

This was a desperately poor performance by most.

I was really impressed with Craig Casey’s energy, venom and leadership off the bench. Why did it take a 22-year-old scrumhalf coming off the bench to try to rouse the team and bring the crowd back into the game?

That was a Captain’s behaviour and it was noticeable. His pass quality, zip, energy and tempo injected energy into Munster’s game, even if he only came on the field right after the result was lost, in all reality.

The manner of Alex Kendellen’s introduction was unfortunate but, as he has done all season, he rose to the standard of the moment. He consistently put himself about in the tackle and at the breakdown in the face of some brutal cleanouts.

When we needed energy, it was Kendellen getting stuck into Leinster like a guy who wasn’t used to clapping them off the field in defeat, even if he had to do it at the end all the same. He played like a leader and with real grit. We could have done with a few more just like him.

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.