Stuart Lancaster: Munster stronger than last season

By Brendan O’Brien

The jury may be out on Munster after the opening five rounds of the Guinness PRO14 but Stuart Lancaster has seen enough to declare that the province is stronger now than it was last season when falling one hurdle short of Pro14 and European deciders.

The Leinster senior coach arrived on the scene in Dublin with, by his own admission, limited knowledge of the interpro scene but he knows Munster intimately by now having faced them five times — winning four of those.

“Munster are a team the players know pretty well. We played them a few times last year and from what I’ve seen they’ve expanded the game a bit, not just from the weekend, but you can see the way they’re looking to move the ball.

“This is a team that has lost twice in European semi-finals, so they’re top of the European game. Joey (Carbery) has gone and so has Tadhg Beirne. Those additions show that they’ve strengthened from last season.”

“It’s a big challenge for us on Saturday and then for both teams, they’ve got Exeter, and we’ve got Wasps coming around the corner. So the challenges come on after that, but I don’t think anyone will look beyond Saturday.”

Of the two teams, Leinster have been the more impressive in this campaign. Leo Cullen’s side have lost just once, narrowly at Parc Y Scarlets. Munster’s form has careered wildly. Brilliant at home against weak opposition, they have disappointed in both away games, against Glasgow Warriors and Cardiff Blues. Lancaster believes the bare statistics and conference tables don’t tell the full story.

“If you looked at some of our performances, certainly our first game against Cardiff away, we were very lucky to win. And then we lost against Scarlets away. The first couple of games of the season can paint a slightly false picture.

“You can only judge where you are when you get to this stage. We faced a full strength Connacht team (last weekend), which Munster probably didn’t with Ulster, and I thought we came through well. We will see where Munster are at this weekend.

“But they’ve a better squad than last year and, wherever I look in most positions, there’s an Irish international in one slot or another. They’ll be confident on the back of beating Ulster given the way and the style in which they did it.

“It’s a big challenge for us defensively. They defend differently to Connacht so we need to make sure we understand how that’s going to play out and, with 40 odd-thousand people already signed up to watch, it’s going to be an amazing game.”

The hope is that Joey Carbery features prominently. The Athy man has played a part in all five of Munster’s games since his summer switch from Leinster and, with Jonathan Sexton featuring so regularly so early in the season, the move makes all the more sense for a man eager to solidify his station in the Ireland squad. The odds are that Carbery would have again found himself banking considerably more game time at full-back than at ten had he stayed in Dublin this season but Lancaster was keen to nip in the bud the notion that Leinster simply didn’t ‘fancy’ him as an out-half.

“We picked Johnny at out-half, to start with. And also, the opportunities to get to play there, (Carbery) was injured. So, let’s not rewrite history and say that we never picked him at out-half. The opportunities were clouded by the injuries.

“I think he is doing well. I don’t think anyone doubted his ability to play at out-half. But there is no doubt as well that you can see from the tries he has scored from the backfield his incisive running in that broken field that he is a serious threat.

“And with the way Munster defend he will be in that backfield once or twice. You want to be careful if he is there but his ability to play in the front line was never in doubt, in my mind. It’s just getting the best out of your resources and understanding what was best for us and for him.”