URC 24/25 Season Ulster V Munster Friday 20th Dec 7:35 Kick-off [Build-up / Match Thread] PS1&TG4

Jack Murphy looked good during his few minutes. Hopefully another one who can push for a green 10 shirt, at some stage.

They wanted him to look at the hit by Nash from the kickoff.

which would have been reasonable if he had looked at the hit on scannell that led to ulster turnover / penalty field position and try. But he didn’t.

I dunno, watch it back. His mistakes were very obvious like missing touch and off the tee but he ran some lovely attacking plays that broke down immediately after with a typical stupid error. 7/10 at worst for me

Just caught a replay of the winning try and he'd a lovely pass out the back up to the tacklers. He did that plenty throughout the game. We hardly had the ball like you said.

I'd be more annoyed with his placekicking to be honest than anything else, he can do better even if some of the kicks were off to the side.

I disagree.

A lot of positive defensively for Munster to take from it.

Players like Patterson, Ahern, killer, O’Connell need game time and got it tonight,

A BP win away without any pack leaders, a third and 4th choice SH and no backup 10 is not to be sniffed at.

surprised Burns wasnt involved tonight.

The form of Gleeson, hodnett and Klendennen along with the return of Ahern for me has jack odonoghues days numbered as a starter. Think I would prefer to see hodnett or Alex play 6 instead of JOD. And if O’Connell gets to the level needed it frees Ahern to play 6 as well. With Beirne and POM available for Games I think jack misses out.

Positives for Munster were the ability to defend 20 phases time after time and then to be clinical with field position. Obviously we were a man up for 40 mins which makes breaking from deep easier.

But discipline was very poor and another couple of injuries to key players potentially. Big drop off from Casey to the other 9s.

Agreed tbh. His place kicking was poor, but some of his kicking out of hand in phase play was very good; he had at least 2 to Hodnett and Farrell. I thought in general he passed, carried and tackled well, tbh.

Some of the provisional stats come out of the game with regards Munster's tackle counts are nuts.

The defence was okay but don’t oversell it - Munster still conceded three tries to a team without a single power carrier in their pack. They seriously lived on the edge too and were blessed that Whitehouse didn’t give them another yellow (Coughlan should have had one), and I think Ulster had penalty advantage when McNabney scored and were on a team warning so that could have been one too.

The bigger question is why they could only manage c. 30% possession against a team that was equally missing at least their three best forwards (Henderson, Izuchukwu, Timoney), that had a man sent off after 30 mins and that picked up plenty of injuries throughout (including to their most effective carrier, McCloskey).