Semi-final defeats give Irish rugby a reality check

At the very least, there won’t be accusations of complacency against Ireland when they head on their tour of South Africa next month. Silver linings and all that.

If we’re reaching for positives after Saturday’s sobering afternoon for Irish rugby, that’s about as enthusiastic as we can get.

Talk of an all-Irish final was greeted like a red rag by the Bulls in Pretoria, before the Glasgow Warriors completed a day of shocks to humble Munster for the second year in a row at Thomond Park.

Both the Bulls and the Warriors were full value for the wins, and that will only sting Leo Cullen, Graham Rowntree, and probably Ireland head coach Andy Farrell even more.

Farrell was watching on at Thomond Park alongside his forwards coach Paul O’Connell, and his eyes may have been drawn to some potential Lions in the Scottish side, rather than the potential Ireland internationals he had planned to watch.

The Ireland head coach is due to name his squad for the tour of South Africa this Wednesday, and it will be interesting to see how the weekend’s results alter his depth chart.

Interestingly, Leinster and Munster seem to have hit a different set of problems late in the season.

For Leinster, their attacking game appears to have been completely stripped down to the basics. Aside from a couple of moments when individuals took the game to the Bulls, they asked few questions of a South African defence which had looked vulnerable over the last two months.

With the Bulls’ injury list seeing them without Kurt-Lee Arendse and Canan Moodie, Leinster continually targeted Sergeal Petersen and Devin Williams on the wings with contestable kicks, from which they got little change.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that approach, and Leinster senior coach Jacques Nienaber could point to South Africa’s World Cup quarter-final win against France as proof of concept, where they excellently exploited aerial indecision in the French backline to create broken-field opportunities.

On the occasions when they got into dangerous attacking positions, their approach looked blunt, summed up by a 23-phase stand on the fringe of the Bulls 22 in the final ten minutes, where they moved from side to side without every really piercing the defence, before a huge double-hit on Caelan Doris, and a powerful counter-ruck, saw the hosts turn over the ball.

For a side who have produced such entertaining and layered, attacking rugby in recent seasons, the regression in their style of play, particularly in their two biggest games of the season, has been worrying.

Also apparent in recent months is how uncomfortable the side are looking outside of Dublin.

In recent seasons, their high league and pool finishes have allowed them home advantage in their knockout games, but they are struggling to hit the right notes away from home; their last win on the road was a URC game away to Zebre in March, before shipping heavy defeats to the Lions and Bulls, followed by an Interpro defeat to Ulster, a Champions Cup loss after extra-time against Toulouse, and now this latest URC semi-final defeat.

On the flip side of that coin, you have Munster, whose appear to be going through the opposite issues.

Their 17-10 defeat to Glasgow on Saturday evening was their latest outing at Thomond Park in which they looked less than comfortable on their own ground.

Looking back at their season as a whole, so many of their best days came away from home, such as their Champions Cup win against Toulon in France, and their back-to-back bonus-point victories in South Africa.

Since December, the fear factor just hasn’t been there at Thomond; Winless at home in the Champions Cup and try-less at home against Leinster, and even allowing for the caveat of a long injury list at the time, their Thomond form only got marginally better as the season progressed.

They limped to a 20-15 win over Cardiff with a strong starting XV, while they only performed in patches against Ulster and the Ospreys. In that span, their only Thomond Park game in which they really clicked was their victory over Connacht.

The real frustration for Munster will be that they’ll look back on this campaign as the one that got away. Having won the URC and earned a high seed in the Champions Cup, their campaign never got off the ground.

That early elimination from Europe did give them the opportunity to attack their United Rugby Championship title defence, but after getting themselves in the best possible position to do so, they barely landed a shot on the day that mattered.

Where Leinster didn’t take enough risks with the ball, Munster were guilty of over-playing on Saturday.

Two moments in particular summed up their day. First, a mix-up between Antoine Frisch and Alex Nankivell in midfield (below) led to a knock-on that was returned for a try by Kyle Steyn, while their final attack ended with a speculative offload from RG Snyman that was spilled by John Ryan.

In two ten-minute periods when Glasgow were down to 14 players for yellow cards, Munster managed just three points, those coming from the penalty directly after Richie Gray’s sin-binning, while the hosts were actually outscored 7-3 in the 20 minutes that they had a man advantage.

While Rowntree’s side overplayed their hand, Franco Smith’s Glasgow deserve huge credit for how they shut Munster down, with their line-speed in defence rushing Munster into decisions at the gainline, before turning the ruck into a bar brawl, and continually disrupting their lineout.

Those weekend results, combined Leinster’s Champions Cup final loss, and Ireland’s defeats to New Zealand at the World Cup and England in the Six Nations, form a worrying pattern of Irish sides failing to deliver on days when it really mattered.

It gives Farrell plenty to ponder ahead of a Test series against the world champions.

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Watch highlights of the weekend’s action on Against the Head, RTÉ2 and RTÉ Player, 10.50pm