Four injuries to all of our senior contracted looseheads left Munster and the IRFU with no choice. A NIQ loosehead would have to be signed ahead of the December/January window on a short-term basis until Jeremy Loughman, at least, was somewhat good to go with his knee injury.

Talk of covering this positional necessity with an AIL call-up only was fanciful; it’s the kind of thing you’d suggest if you had no skin in the game. Munster were never seriously considering just using the AIL to cover this particular injury crisis. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get the best of both worlds by using a NIQ loosehead with URC and Champions Cup experience AND bringing in an AIL scrum murder machine like Conor Bartley.

Conor Bartley can cover loosehead and tighthead. Where he covers for Munster really does depend on who we get back fit and when. Scrummaging is definitely his biggest strength as a player, though and even a cursory look at his game will tell you that’s where he comes alive as a player.

You can make out from these highlights against Portugal A that he’s a destructive scrummager on the tighthead side, which is no joke. Being destructive as a loosehead is “easy” to an extent but getting that kind of movement on the tighthead side tells you a lot about what he brings.

Around the field, he’s definitely a support forward-build player but has a deceptively strong carrying game.

You can see his open play involvements against Portugal A for the Ireland Club XV here and get a really good feel for how he’ll look for Munster.

The only question is scaling. If called upon against the Lions at the end of the month, for example, could he give us a solid 15 minutes off the bench anywhere near what we saw above? If so, he’ll be a valuable role player, but the players he’ll be likely to come up against will be mostly bigger and stronger than what he’s faced so far in his career in the AIL. Now he has faced bigger and stronger men this year in the Shute Shield in Australia for UWA – he has quite a good game as a starting tighthead here – and that gives me a lot of confidence, but Europe and interpros are a different level. The omens are good though.

Dian Bleuler is a specialist loosehead from the Sharks with Currie Cup, URC and Champions Cup experience in the last two years, primarily as an impact player off the bench.

Signing him on a three-month deal produces several questions straight off the back.

Why has he not played more for the Sharks? Is he not playing for the Sharks because he’s rubbish? If he’s any good, why is he released mid-season?

All of those questions are answered by looking at the Sharks transfer business in the off-season when they signed Trevor Nyakane and Ruan Dreyer, two highly experienced swing props, to cover Ox Nche and Ntuthuko Mchunu. Bleuler went from third in the depth chart behind Mchunu to fifth. Nyakane has mopped up most of the 1B loosehead minutes this season and that meant that Bleuler had to make do with minutes in the Currie Cup where he was 1B to Braam Reyneke, a young loosehead who the Sharks really like.

Bleuler was out of contract this November after signing a two-year deal in 2022 that took him to the end of the Currie Cup and that’s why he’s available.

In any other South African club other than the Sharks – whose entire transfer strategy can be described as Go Big Or Go Home – I think he’d be a solid URC option for them and, long term, I see him picking up a contract at one of the other three South African teams if this short term deal goes well.

Bleuler was quite highly rated in South African rugby coming out of his u20 campaign with the Junior Boks, so I think his time at Munster will be watched quite closely.

Physically, Bleuler looks to be a legit 5’10” and plays around 113kg at the moment, although he has played heavier. He’s a very aggressive scrummager and, at his best, he’s got elements of Ox Nche’s “scrum cube” cheat code pop work. That’s consistent with shorter looseheads and he lives up to that archetype.

In phase play, Bleuler is a punchy defender and a really underrated ball carrier. He’s got a low centre of gravity and he uses that to get the kind of gainline wins you’d normally expect of a player far taller and heavier. That is most visible in a very specific way; he is massively effective from the 5m line in phase play and specifically during tap-and-go sequences.

He almost scores on this one just a few minutes after coming off the bench. Look at the leg drive to stay active through contact here.

He then gets another opportunity after the Pumas infringe and scores directly from the launch.

Every time the Sharks got a 5m tap-and-go sequence when Bleuler was on the field in this game, they scored; either through Bleuler himself or on the next phase. His low centre of gravity means that he almost always surfs the first tackler and gets those 4+ metres that are so hard to get consistently – as we well know at Munster.

For me, Bleuler maps quite closely onto a Nicky Smith-type loosehead. He’s not a physical game-changer in the way a Thomas Du Toit would have been back in 2016/17, but that type of player is not available now. The Sharks had no problem loaning Du Toit then because they were in Super Rugby. These days they are competitors with Munster, as all the South African franchises are, so getting a short-term deal like this is good work.

Bleuler feels like one of those players that ends up at the Emirates Lions next season and, all of a sudden, turns into one of those super underrated guys that everyone actually rates quite highly but he just doesn’t play test rugby.

What would I expect from him? Solid scrummaging, a few tries and something that might amount to cult-hero status if all goes well.

Exactly what you need from a medical joker.