Strategy changes will take time, warns Walsh

Munster attack coach Brian Walsh has warned reinstating some of the province’s core rugby values after the Rob Penney era’s "wide-wide" offensive strategy will take some time.

The new coaching regime, led by Anthony Foley, will aim to get its first Guinness Pro12 victory of the season at Benetton Treviso tonight following a sorry opening-day defeat to Edinburgh at Thomond Park last Friday.

That continued an unenviable losing streak at their spiritual Limerick home, a third Thomond defeat in succession, previous head coach Penney’s two-year tenure having fizzled out with regular season league losses to Glasgow and Ulster.

Foley, before departing for Italy yesterday morning, said the much criticised wide-wide approach adopted by the previous regime, in which he was forwards coach, would not be abandoned completely but it would no longer be the single emphasis of Munster’s attacking play it had been under Walsh’s successor Simon Mannix.

“We’re doing some things different. Some will remain the same, we’ve a different focus on how we want to go about it,” Foley said.

“We want to play with a bit more tempo, I don’t know if anyone had the time on how long the Edinburgh game took from start to finish, but it was very stop-start. We want to play with tempo in our game and take the game to the opposition.... but in terms of going wide-wide as we did in the last few years, there’ll be an element of that, but it’s not the sole thing we’re going about doing.”

The man charged with effecting not so much a new direction but a recalibration is backs coach Walsh and, speaking before the Edinburgh defeat, he told the Irish Examiner it would be a lengthy process.

“You’re changing a lot of things and it’s a bit of a domino effect,” Walsh said. “It’s probably a harder push to get the first one over and then it starts to pick up a bit of momentum. You can see some reasonable shape coming to it and hopefully that will get better and we can build on that.

“I’m asking players to think a lot more about what they’re doing and why... the response has been very good.”

Walsh said certain core Munster rugby values had been jettisoned for a system that was quickly decoded by rival defences.

“Rugby needs an element of go-forward in it to stimulate reasonable attack and I just think artificially trying to create that can be difficult at times,” he said.

“It requires a very specific skill set and a culture around playing the game that way, no different from me trying to change the culture a little bit around attack at the moment.

“That’s a process and I think opposition teams had worked out Munster were going wide-wide and started to get inside of the ball and shut them down and hit hard back off touchlines and it became very difficult to attack.

“There were good aspects to that in terms of the handling and ability to play in wider spaces but I’m a firm believer you have to have go-forward and attack is built from in to out for me.”

Walsh also implied the game-plan last season had not been suited to the players available.

“I wouldn’t discount all that was in that game, it does create space for people if you have a certain skill set and the right people to hit the holes. We’d all like to pick a world XV, put them out and play a bit of fantasy rugby and see how we get on but you’ve got to deal with what skill sets you have as well and try to make that as effective as possible. I don’t think you can just get people and put them into a pattern and expect it work.

“So there’s a lot of work to be done on the individual skill set of people being able to recognise what’s in front of them and apply the right solution.

“Without being definitive about it, the attack has to suit the culture and the psyche of the side as well. You can’t discount guys that have played a certain way for 10 years, so it’s about bringing back the best of what’s been there in terms of our aggression and go-forward play and balancing that with the ability to play the wider game at the right time.

“Munster have always had a very good understanding of pressure and that has brought them the most success, so you can’t throw that piece out either. So we’re building that flexible template that will allow us to adapt to different teams and conditions whilst maintaining the values that have been most successful over the years.

“You can certainly have ambition about the way we want to play because some players are at that level but what you’ve got to do is to bring up the baseline right across the board so everybody has a very good, fundamental attacking game. Once we have that we can build an added bit of complexity. It will be direct but that doesn’t mean it will be narrow.”