REDS PUSH LUCK
Van Graan cries no foul but card looks marked
‘Back-rowers will go for early 50-50s and test the referee’
THERE were only seconds left on the clock last year when Munster shoddily crashed at Leicester. CJ Stander was penalised for not releasing at the ruck and Owen Williams slotted his sixth penalty to steal the 18-16 win. It represented an incredible turnaround from the 0-38 humiliation inflicted on Tigers the previous weekend in Limerick.
It was painful viewing, with Simon Zebo admitting this week that it was one of the rare occasions in the Rassie Erasmus era where players were forced to do a bit of soul searching after getting bullied at the breakdown.
Munster are wary of encountering a similar ambush as they prepare to head back to Welford Road next Sunday. This time, Leicester are stinging from a 33-10 loss that had their coach, Matt O’Connor, accusing Peter O’Mahony’s side of being ‘very, very diligent and cynical in killing the ball whenever we had opportunities’.
O’Mahony had led the turnover posse at Thomond Park that stifled Leicester. Watch the tape and he is spotted being a constant nuisance with a mix of legal interventions and some canny dark arts, such as using a hand to support his bodyweight at the ruck.
He wasn’t alone in getting the benefit of the doubt from referee Jerome Garces, who regularly stood back and allowed a feral breakdown contest to develop, the sort that suited Munster and drove frustrated Leicester to distraction.
How this weekly battle over what you can and can’t get away with is continually intriguing, second row Billy Holland offering insight on how it develops game by game. ‘At the start, back-rowers will go for 50-50 balls and will test the referee,’ he explained.
‘They need to test the referee and it’s up to the captain to see how it’s going. If you’re penalised twice in a row you know that you will need to pull back a bit.’
O’Connor’s criticism was widely misinterpreted as a slur when it was actually a compliment for the more streetwise Munster’s ability to push the envelope and tease out the refereeing interpretations. Munster generally played Garces well but with O’Connor now having shone a torch on alleged unpunished chicanery, will they keep on getting away with it with Mathieu Raynal next up to run the rule over them?
Munster have ridden their luck in recent months. Last Saturday was the sixth match in the past eight where they came off worse on the penalty count and where the level of concession nudged into double figures (12, 13, 13, 9, 6, 11, 11, 11 dating back to their early October league derby loss at Leinster).
Coughing up no more than six penalties is their desired benchmark, according to assistant coach Jerry Flannery. However, while it’s a target regularly proving beyond their reach, they are defying the odds.
They still win more than they lose in the league, while three rounds into Europe, they lead their pool despite being the Champions Cup’s third most indisciplined side, their concession of 34 penalties being 16 more than the best-behaved Leinster, another unbeaten pool topper.
Seventeen different Munster players have been singled out by referees against Castres, Racing and Leicester, their starting forwards accounting for 17 penalties, with eight more coming from pack replacements, but there doesn’t appear to be a concern heading to Leicester as no one area dominates the rap sheet.
‘No, it’s definitely not a problem,’ said new boss Johann van Graan despite his inherited team giving up 38 penalties in his three outings (12 versus Leicester, two 13s in the league versus Zebre and Ospreys).
‘You look at every penalty by itself, there is not a trend that we concede penalties in one specific area.
‘There was one scrum penalty (against Leicester), a side entry in a maul, two holding on penalties, one offside — so it’s not a trend when we concede 10 penalties in one area.
‘The interesting thing is we only had four penalties in the first half, the first 60 we had six or seven, which is quite normal for a game of this magnitude. It was just the last bit, we conceded five in five minutes, which we can be a lot better in. I’ll take the positive that we defended our own line with the game won and a bonus point in the bag.’
Jean Kleyn readily supports this consensus that Munster’s indiscipline is spasmodic rather than a general rot across a whole 80 minutes. ‘We’re very conscious about our penalty count the last few weeks,’ admitted the South African lock, at fault for two Tigers penalties and four of the 34 in Europe.
‘It hasn’t been good, but we do analysis and from what we have seen we have a little bit of a slump towards the end of the second half, lose concentration a little bit… we need to start sharpening up, especially the last 20 minutes. Just work on our discipline, really not let the other team back in.’
That sounds like an imperative to deny Leicester two weekends in a row.