When you talk about “systems” in rugby, you leave people behind straight away. I’ve been at this long enough to know that. For all the evolutions in the understanding of advanced tactics in rugby over the last few years, there comes a point where pods, screens and progressions just turn into word salad.

So when you hear the likes of me, and others, talking about Munster’s new system over the last six weeks, it begs two questions straight away.

1. What is Munster’s system?
2. A new system? How is it different from the old one?

I’m going to try and build on the background to the work I’ve already put down here to try to show you how we got here.

First of all, what is a system?

A system as it’s usually described is your approach to the game when you are in possession of the ball as illustrated by how you align your players’ phase for phase, and what you tell them to do in certain situations. The first time “systems” entered my rugby consciousness was early in the last decade but it was properly cemented when I was complaining about Simon Zebo getting passed over for Dave “fucking” Kearney by Joe Schmidt to a friend of mind in a bar in Timaru, New Zealand in early 2014 right before I left for Italy.

How, I wondered aloud, is it possible that Joe Schmidt would value whatever it is that Dave Kearney does well over the creativity and try scoring ability of Simon Zebo? 

My friend – he was driving me to the airport later that week – would explain it to me in a way that kinda walloped me up the side of the head. “Kearney’s breakdown work is better. Schmidt doesn’t need a guy who might score tries to make his system work, he needs a guy who will secure the vast majority of wide breakdowns so a forward doesn’t have to”.

I’d like to say I was gracious and accepting of this new level of knowledge but no, I was not. This handy Roy Keane screengrab is a good approximation of my reaction.

A winger’s breakdown work? Why not talk about how well your tighthead prop can kick goals while you’re at it? I didn’t get it. Wingers score tries, play on their phones during breaks in play and are pure pests on the beer. Forwards do the… do the rucking. Right?

I was clueless. What we were seeing from Joe Schmidt in the early 2010s was integrated rugby which, during phase play, is, when done well, essentially positionless.

Props will be passing, locks will be taking offloads, midfielders and wingers will look like old-school openside flankers and hookers will look like old-school #8s.

Integrated rugby has shaken up what we understood about what players in certain positions are supposed to do and what they are expected to do. That integration is your System. How the players you have blend together, how they play the game and how they navigate through 80 minutes.

In 2016/17, our system was Rassie Erasmus’ and Jacques Nienaber’s Heavy Kick Pressure game that would ultimately win the Springboks a World Cup in 2019. It was perfect for the group we had and when Rassie didn’t have the exact components he needed in the squad, he scratched and clawed to get those components in.

Jean Kleyn, Rhys Marshall and Jaco Taute were all brought in before the first Champions Cup game while we managed to get in the colossal Thomas Du Toit as a medical joker with Jean Deysel coming in under the same terms later in the season. Heavy Kick Pressure needs a big scrum (which we had), a big set piece front five (which we had), a powerful ball carrier with a combo flanker build in the back row to apply pressure in all facets of the game, an elite box kicking #9, a controller at #10, a disciplined midfield and a back three adept at chasing and applying edge pressure.

Does that sound familiar? A beefed-up version of that game plan won a World Cup two years later. It almost brought Munster a trophy in 2016/17. It probably would have with a bit of luck with injury and a bit more depth to prevent burnout during the year but outside of that, it worked for us. It would have worked even better with Erasmus and Nienaber in situ for a further two seasons but it wasn’t to be.

So, when we were looking to replace Erasmus and Nienaber, our primary criterion was to find someone who would be able to build on what we knew worked from the previous season – to essentially construct Kick Pressure 2 :: This Time With A Smaller Pack Because We Lost Donnacha Ryan, Oh And We Need Our Attack To Evolve Too Because People Have Worked Out How To Stop Us. It’s a wordy title, I’ll give you that.

It’s also way easier said than done. At test level even now we’re seeing the challenges that the Springboks are having moving away from Heavy Kick Pressure to something more modern.

Effective attacking rugby is not easy because what is effective changes every season. Felix Jones wasn’t able to push on the attack quickly enough but, even then, I always got the feeling that he and Van Graan didn’t gel fully as coaches on a philosophical level. Heavy Kick Pressure doesn’t really need an attack coach because the kicking, set piece and defensive side of the ball is your attack. You need your attack coach to be an analyst, almost, to best wield the pressure generated as a byproduct of the Heavy Kick Pressure engine. That was Felix Jones. It’s why Rassie signed him straight up for the Springboks, in my opinion.

When Van Graan brought in Stephen Larkham to replace Felix Jones as the main attacking coaching voice, the perception was that he’d been signed in to revolutionise Munster’s attacking systems. I certainly thought so anyway but, while he did bring in the 3-2-X shape that was gaining in popularity at the time, it was with players used to a slower game over the previous three seasons.

By “slow”, I mean a game that preserved the energy of the forwards through the box kick. What Heavy Kick Pressure does is reduce the energy output of the forwards during most of the game – all they have to do is advance up the field 20m/30m max every few phases and then defend narrow while the backs do the outside blitzing and chasing. We didn’t move away from a game that had that as the base part of our framework or, if we did, it was never too far away.

Last season, for example, we were middle of the road when it came to kicking volume and distance. Teams like Leinster, for example, kicked far more and far longer than Munster did as a raw percentage but a lot of our possessions ended in kicks, relatively speaking. It was often assumed that it was Johann Van Graan who was the man demanding Munster play low-ish possession, high relative kick, and low PPC rugby but it would most often be Stephen Larkham who would make that call ahead of a lot of regular-season match weeks.

We were still half a kick pressure – a style still quite comfortably embedded into most of our senior squad – team and half something else but we rarely played at a pace that threatened Leinster, for example. When we played Leinster we most often settled into the style of game that we knew could beat them – and bigger sides, like Saracens did beat them – but we were too small to play that game and hope to win consistently. We didn’t have a big enough scrum, we didn’t have consistently big enough packs and the gimmick we’d used to try to shortcut those things – a team heavily tilted towards jackal threats – needed a referee to make decisions that would then win us the game. Fine in theory, but it needs a referee to insert himself decisively in big games to give Munster a win.

That’s not really how most referees operate when it comes down to it, especially in big games, especially away from home. It was a form of coaching pragmatism undone by naivety. You will get breakdown penalties if you can establish that you’re dominant elsewhere too. That isn’t how it should be, but it’s how it is.

We only beat Leinster once – in the Rainbow Cup – during Larkham and Van Graan’s three-year term and we mostly lost the same way. Low PPC game from Munster, with a lot of box kicking to their wingers and then a lot of recriminations about how we didn’t get the defensive breakdown return that we probably should have. We knew what we were doing could beat Leinster but we didn’t have the size to do it consistently. This reduction of your own game with the idea that what you do will limit the effectiveness of what the opposition does was this Munster side over the last two seasons. Tactically very smart and very adaptable but incapable of mapping our own game onto an opposition. We were saboteurs at heart, far more comfortable destroying someone else’s framework than imposing ours on them. 

Ultimately, we were still enough of a Kick Pressure team – this time with a smaller pack – that it limited whatever the coach’s vision for us was. We wanted to play heavier because we plainly recruited as such but losing Snyman for the last two seasons of that coaching team’s term was a killer.

You can’t be a halfway crook. You either are or you are not.

That’s where Munster are this season. We know that Heavy Kick Pressure or a dilution of it doesn’t work for this Munster side because after three years of half-Kick Pressure, half-something else we’ve never been further away. We don’t have the size in the pack to play that game so we need to “stretch our legs”. One of the tenets of Heavy Kick Pressure is the number of phases you choose to play inside your half of the field or just outside the opponent’s 10m line. At its purest distillation, Heavy Kick Pressure is about cutting down your possession in all zones of the field and then, when you do choose to play phase possession most often inside that 10m line mark, it’s mostly about retaining possession which means carry off #9, carry off #9, pass from #9 to #10 and then another carry until you win a penalty or an obvious hole appears. More often than not, your best-attacking work is done within 3 phases of a lineout or scrum.

It’s a mindset. It’s a language.

What Munster are doing under Rowntree and Prendergast is different. Yes, it’s rugby, but the intent is wildly different. We’re going from being a half-in-half Kick Pressure/Ruck Point Attack Off The Set Piece side to a team that will try to play through 9/10 phases around our own 10m line.

Last season we kicked from there inside three phases almost every time. Under Rassie it was kicked from there within one phase. This year we’re trying to manipulate teams from here through multi-phase possession of six or seven phases or more. Why is that different? Players that are not used to resetting and creating a framework in that zone that demands higher skills at a higher pace are struggling to adapt. They are a second off where they should be or a second ahead because they’re anxious about being where they are supposed to be. Playing that amount of possession near your own 10m line when you don’t do so usually can be quite an anxious task. Any mistake is a critical loss of possession, any breakdown error is a kickable penalty or a damaging kick into your 22. It will take time to build the mental resilience you need throughout the entire squad.

They are missing cleanouts because they aren’t used to being active that long phase for phase or finding themselves in uncomfortable scenarios where they have to make up an extra few metres laterally while also being an effective blocker and pass option. We are no longer a Kick Pressure team in any guise. Since July 2016 the majority of the senior players in this squad have been playing a form of Kick Pressure in one guise or the other. Those tendencies are not boiled away in four full games and two friendlies.

It’s like saying “well, you can speak English, which uses words, why can’t you speak French which also uses words”?

Where we’re going will work, I believe it, but we need to make sure we don’t take shortcuts to get there.