Scotstoun – 29th March, 2013

Stadio Monigo – 20th September 2013 

Rodney Parade – 6th December 2015

Aviva Stadium – 21st May 2021

Rodney Parade – 25th September 2022

Thomond Park – 25th March 2023

Sportsground – 1st January 2024 

Stadio Sergio Lanfranche – 28th September 2024 

These are the worst Munster performances that I’ve seen in the last ten and a bit years.

There are probably others – I could put in most of 2015/16, for example – but these are the ones that stick out as I’m thinking about it.

First, it’s bizarre that so many of these bad performances happen between the 20th and 30th of September in any given year. Second, we’ve had a lot in the last three years.

There’s also no denying we’ve had some excellent performances in the last three seasons – the last two South African tours, the URC playoff run in 2022/23, and a few others – but I think it’s fair to say that we’re likely to see anything from this current playing group if the conditions are right, for good or ill. We have a very high ceiling, but a floor that you could dig coal out the side of.

That floor includes losing to Zebre Parma now, who had won two league games in the three seasons before this game.

This is a humiliation, there’s no other word for it. We can talk about it being Week 2 until the cows come home, and we can talk about the guys who weren’t playing all we want, but the fact remains that we lost. To Zebre. That performance on Saturday was a humiliation for everyone associated with this club and if your first reaction to that statement is “woah, steady on” you need to wise up.

Losing to Zebre regardless of whether it’s week two or week eighteen is irrelevant; it shouldn’t happen for a club with this history, prestige and budget. This loss is the equivalent of losing three games in a row because it has heaped pressure on the next four games in a way that is unquantifiable because of what it says about this group.

It says “these guys are capable of losing in Parma” and if that can said, there’s no limit to how bad things could get. To be clear, it doesn’t say that Munster can’t play well next week against the Ospreys, or Leinster the week after that, or that we can’t have a good season after this, including winning the URC or going deeper in Europe than we have done recently.

But it does say that there’s no level of performance too low for this group on a given day in the right circumstances. That should put a knot in every player and coach’s stomach in the HPC.

Make this your lock screen.

This is what we’re capable of.

***

I wrote the following in Friday’s Red Eye.

Zebre are at their best against teams who show up with a tonne of new combinations or debuting players. If you’re still firming up your defensive systems after the preseason or are waiting for internationals to come back after their various summer breaks, Zebre Parma can sting you. We have to be wary.

We weren’t as wary as maybe we should have been and they stung us. The question is, I suppose, how.

The answer is simple; a complete defensive collapse on a systemic level. I think Zebre identified where we were weak and, with a little on-field improvising, were able to slice us up, almost at will.

You might remember from my preview where I spoke about Zebre attacking the near spaces of the ruck more than any other team in the league last season while also getting width incredibly quickly. These were the two areas we seemed to leave fully exposed for the entire game.

Their first try would be repeated at a conceptual level later in the game but it’s plagued us since pre-season. Fitzgerald was terrified of leaving Butler with any kind of solo tackle to make so stuck way too close to him and got bumped by the decoy runner.

You can see it here. When Fitzgerald got bumped – ideally he’d be able to shift his weight to guard Butler as insurance before shifting it the other way, swimming away from the decoy runner to allow Farrell to push out – it meant everything collapsed outside him.

Abrahams took some heat online for stepping in, but it was the only defensive play there. If he didn’t Zebre’s pocket runner could slide through without a hand on him.

Their second try is where things start to get iffy. It comes off a maul break where, again, we have to ensure Butler doesn’t ever get one-on-one defensive contact but the problems radiate from elsewhere.

You can see the problems developing from the first collision point with this much space developing between Jager and Kleyn as they transit from maul defence to line defence.

Quinn and Coombes file into wider spaces, along with Wycherley but I’m not sure if this is optimal. When you look at the rest of the defensive sets it seems that Quinn should have taken a central position here rather than drifting to the edges.

Either way, look at the space left on the next ruck; Zebre could have scored right under the posts here – all they’d have to do was beat Jager and Kleyn in around 15m of lateral space.

On the next ruck, the effect was exaggerated again when Jager was left to guard a massive chasm between Kleyn and Fitzgerald, both of whom were way too far apart from the ruck. It’s an impossible situation for a 130kg man to defend on his own.

You can see that Zebre have completely abandoned the openside as the ball is recycled. Easy to say now but Fitzgerald could have snipped in a little closer earlier, as could Kleyn.

McCarthy also shoots off ahead of the ball from behind the point of the ruck a little too early for me. It ignores the very real threat of the snipe, which cost us last week against Connacht.

One bad game can happen. Two games in a row is a pattern that teams are exploiting and we’re not fixing.

In the second half, you can see Quinn is in a central position to fill the spaces left by our two props and locks. At this stage, Ryan and Loughman are on the field but you can already see the same defensive space – Ryan struggling to transit behind the ruck to cover a snipe – that was there against Connacht. Zebre don’t score from this but look at the gainline they get with a simple scrumhalf snipe.

It feels like we’re trying to gamble the central spaces to make sure we fill the field elsewhere but when we’re not slowing the ruck – 44% of Zebre’s ruck possession was under three seconds – we leave our props with a lot of work to do covering those collision points.

A few minutes later we were caught rotten off a scrum launch and, once again, a fear that Butler can’t make one-on-one tackles cost us a linebreak, before scandalously poor tight defence gave Zebre deep 22 access.

Look at the linebreak – Fitzgerald stuck to close to Butler so gets scragged by the decoy runner and taken out of the game.

We get hands on the runner eventually and pull him to the ground but our tight defence on the next phase is genuinely disgraceful. How Wycherley sits down on his heels too early, Loughman gets unsighted by the referee and Zebre make easy ground right up the side of the ruck.

Soft. Watch for how badly we handle the ruck transit behind the collision in this next clip and pay attention to Red #18 – John Ryan.

Too much space for him to guard solo. No clarity from the inside defenders. He’s just floating in the space and gets dragged again by Fusco with a snipe and draw.

On the next ruck, Ryan tries to cover the pillar again but there’s too much space. Zebre just break up the middle of the ruck and got beyond the 5m line. They’d score a few phases later.

The next one is really frustrating so I’ll just play the damn clip. McCarthy is under pressure here from the kick-through and, a bit like in Bath during the preseason, panics a little. He keeps the ball in play rather than getting it off the pitch so we can reset. Zebre attack on transition, McCarthy misses his defensive transition tackle and we’re in trouble.

We make the tackle eventually but there’s no slowdown on the ball. Zebre are playing with really quick ruck ball and we keep having to reset behind the penalty line. Look at how much movement Fusco generates with Ryan and Coombes here.

On the next ruck, Daly and O’Donoghue are covering a lot of ground with Butler as the last edge defender up against Zebre’s explosive wingers so they’re calling for Coombes to fill the space. Loughman, Daly and O’Donoghue are so focused on that threat they start watching bodies, not the ball.

A dummy like this shouldn’t take out four players.

And that was that.

Zebre added another when we couldn’t get a decent stop on their ruck speed – a common thread – but then couldn’t get hands on the runner either. Fitzgerald gets up after the tackle here and starts running to the openside where seven Munster defenders are already defending four Zebre forwards.

McCarthy was left guarding the space outside Kleyn and it’s a lot to ask to make an inexperienced academy defender to make the key defensive read here.

It was bad. It was real bad.

Combined with the evidence of what we saw against Connacht, we can now safely say that it isn’t just individuals making bad reads, the system itself is flawed. We want to pack the relative middle of the field off the ruck with forwards to make sure we always have forwards stopping forwards but we seem so worried about the ball reaching the edges – where we have new combinations, rookies with key defensive deficiencies, AIL guys making their debut and academy players guarding complex space – that we’re trying to push as many forwards as possible across the field to make sure we have bodies in the way.

As a result, we seem to have stopped competing at the ruck almost entirely in favour of staying active in the line. Zebre would make errors – and they did – but they realised quite quickly that you could kill us on the pillars because we needed to move so many bodies across the pitch to cover space.

What’s the solution? Get Crowley back so we get more space on his outside shoulder and inside shoulder. That alone prevents two of Zebre’s tries. After that, it’s about clarity – cut down on the movement expected from the heaviest forwards. Use the small forward-build players like Hodnett, Barron and Quinn to fill central space and get Nankivell and Farrell minutes together with a settled winger unit so they can get used to defending space as a group.

We got it badly wrong here, especially in the second half once we went to the bench.

Our offensive work at the breakdown was just as bad, but that’s another article entirely (on the €10 tier this week).

Nobody wants to play badly. No player wants to let the club down as part of a team on any given matchday. This week is an opportunity to put things right but if we’re honest, we’ll recognise a lot of the guys on this team from previous horror shows on the list at the top of the page. The starting pack bar Quinn and maybe Coombes was really bad. They were beaten up and shamed by a pack that finished bottom of the league last year in almost every metric.

The bench were worse in that they were picked to give us impact and instead, gave us absolutely nothing. Senior players, experienced guys, and they couldn’t turn the game for us. Why are they there if they can’t do that against Zebre? That’s a question that will linger until this defeat can be expunged – if that is even possible.

It’ll be a long week.

Players	Rating
Josh Wycherley	★★
Diarmuid Barron	★
Oli Jager	★
Jean Kleyn	★
Fineen Wycherley	★
Ruadhan Quinn	★★★
John Hodnett	★★
Gavin Coombes	★★
Craig Casey	★★★
Tony Butler	★
Thaakir Abrahams	N/A
Tom Farrell	★★
Shane Daly	N/A
Calvin Nash	★★
Mike Haley	★
Niall Scannell	★★
Jeremy Loughman	★
John Ryan	★
Jack O'Donoghue	★★
Jack Daly	★★
Conor Murray	★★
Bryan Fitzgerald	★★
Shay McCarthy	★★