curates_egg wrote:The long kicking from McGrath was a baffling strategy. Put us under a lot of pressure. That and a load of other errors and turnovers.
We should have won a lot more easily. Officials were poor, but we made life difficult for ourselves.
But we won.
Lowe was by far the best attacking player on the pitch. But he also missed at least 2 tackles and is down for 3 turnovers. Made a couple of poor reads but they did target him.
So I think both sides of the argument here protest too much.
Our back three performed just as we expected in fact.
Delighted to win. That performance would see us lose against Scarlets though.
Agree with all of this. Compare our box kicking to Murray's in terms of quality and it was world's apart. Murray gave them a chance to contest/win possession every time. We just booted the ball long and got set for the counter. We looked extremely leggy on Saturday, we should have won more comfortably but thankfully got over the line in the end.
Our lineout was poor, Munster made hay all day either by stealing, disrupting or turning over our lineout maul on their own line.
The positive is obviously the result, but the performance will need to be much better if we're to have a chance of beating Scarlets. In our last 5 matches (Benneton, Scarlets, Connacht, Racing, Munster) the only great performance was against Scarlets in the European semi final, perhaps a long season post Lions tour and Grand Slam exertions are finally taking their toll.
On a completely different note, I thought the self proclaimed Best Fans in The World (TM) were supposed to be somewhat knowledgeable? I had 2 utter morons sitting behind me. They complained about every decision that went our way. I finally called them on their bullshit when Larmour tried to intercept a pass on their penalty advantage and they called for a yellow card. Then they started on about Leinster having a sense of entitlement. They thought Kleyn was hard done by (should have been red) but he was only sin binned because the crowd booed and the ref was a disgrace. They wanted Ross Byrne red carded for tackling Earls as he scored. It really was painful listening to them. They didn't even stay until the end, as soon as Carbery scored the decisive penalty the f**ked off. They really can't cope that we're a better, more successful team than them. It's great!