Munster Team Talk Thread - Beirne After Reading

Kleyn could only have been released as a favour to the player by Munster which is fair enough, no harm to keep players happy

Considering Ahern, Beirne , Wycherly and Edogbo were available, it wasn’t a great hardship.

By the usual treatment do you mean they both got to start 2 games each?

Good post but id say the tighthead situation has panned out exactly as expected so far. Jager always has issues and Roman has played exactly as much as you'd expect. Ryan went over the hill last season. Archer outperformed him.

Its entirely predictable unfortunately and has panned out exactly as predicted by many.

I know it is being addressed but just seems like a waste of one of the few years of clayton we will have

Well apparently we were in the market this season, but couldn't get any quality props over the line. Bartley also being injured isn't great. We're still getting good minutes into 22 year old Ronan Foxe, who looks like he's be a good pro in a couple of seasons.

4 pts dropped

Pity as first half was so good

Not scoring anything in second half won't win many games

Hope that result won't bite us later on in year

Still at start of year we would have taken our season start

Couple of big selection calls this week for Bath. We have kleyn beirne fineen edogbo ahern. Beirne to 6. Who will start and bench? Will we go 6/2?

Nank or kelly with Farrell?

I watched the Sarries v Bath game at the weekend. Baths have a hefty and good scrum. Getting parity there will be difficult. They have plenty of grunt about them. To be honest they look better than last year.

Some scrum stats from TRK, hard to argue it didn't cost us the match. 5 of our 13 penalties against us came from the scrum.

We have the third-most penalised scrum in the league when it comes to scrum offences committed — free kicks and penalties conceded — just behind the Ospreys and Dragons.

League average for offences for scrum is 26%.
We're at 31%.
Stormers - 22% (11 of 50).
Sharks - 14% (8 of 58).
Leinster: 28% (17 of 60).

• We tend to win our own ball (89% of the time) but it's defensive scrums where we're in trouble. Most of our woes the other night were on the tighthead side. That meant they were able to get up the field quite easily (they had 21 lineouts, we had 12) and force us to reset and build again from deep, which, to be fair, our backs did well at times. We actually attacked well I thought, the Stormers don't cough up tries easily and their 22 defence is excellent and we repeatedly caused them trouble.

• My own thoughts are it's probably no shock given Jager is out (our scrum functions better when he's there, stats during his game-time tell this tale) and we've a 37 year old tight head and a very raw 22 year old sub the last few games. I think Kleyn was a big loss too in terms of oomph behind the front row. Archer was notably better when he had Kleyn behind him. I actually would have preferred to keep him on for the extra season rather than Ryan.

• Keeping Jager and MA fit for crucial games at the business end against strong scrums is absolutely vital. Crowley is the other vital cog. I think PFPatterson or Coughlan could cover for Casey adequately enough but there's too much of a gap at 10 with the others comparatively if we're talking semi-finals and finals imo.

Some of our kicking could have been better, some of Casey's boxkicks didn't get much distance and there was no wind there so no excuse… a couple of Crowley's crossfield kicks were a fraction off. Nanks had an unusually poor game, he's normally so consistent for us. Coombes made a stupid decision with the trip, Crowley's intercept is a try for us on another day. That disallowed try at the end works for us on another day and we're 5-1 winners. Some very fine margins that went against us, them's the breaks.

I'm still very optimistic about the season and if you're going to be brought back down to earth this wasn't a bad game for it... but there's lots to be positive about. We lead for 67 minutes and had 56% possession. They have the best red zone defence in the league and we tore through it - they give up 1 try every 8.5 entries, we scored 3 tries out of 7 entries. Our attack is humming, our lineout can be a weapon offensively/defensively (Ahern is become more and more influential here), we still have some players to come back from injury (Gleeson, Haley, Nash, Kendellen), hope Michael A will help shore up the scrum and Jager is back to fitness. Having a bench of players like Edogbo/Hodnett/Kelly is an improvement on where we were in recent seasons where there wasn't much impact beyond the first 15.

We look like a well-coached and well-drilled side, will be interesting to see how these next run of games go, we'll know a lot more about us by mid-January. Bath look to have a strong scrum, I really hope one or both of Jager and MA are available for selection.

If the list is accessible to the public I'd say they couldn't add him to it until his transfer was announced. They likely have a backup plan to get him involved in the upcoming Champions Cup games

I'd prefer to see Butler take the 10 jersey and let Crowley recover properly… Don't think I'm alone in that opinion