Following a 26-10 victory for Munster over Ospreys in the United Rugby Championship (URC), here’s our five takeaways from Saturday’s game at Brewery Field.
The top line
You had to go back to 2001 to find Munster’s last appearance at the Brewery Field. Little if anything has changed at the ground in the intervening years and the outcome – victory to the travelling Irish side – wasn’t a change either, only this time it was the Ospreys on the receiving end and not Bridgend.
The match host club have long fallen away from the professional rugby frontline in Wales, and fears have heightened that Ospreys are also set to step away with the WRU vowing to go from four regional sides to three.
The loss of stars Dewi Lake and Jac Morgan to Gloucester next summer wasn’t the comforting news Ospreys fans wanted in the lead-up to Christmas, and a short-lived 11th-minute lead through a Dan Edwards penalty was scant consolation playing with the wind.
An unnecessary Max Nagy trip on Shane Daly resulted in a 16th-minute yellow card and Daly was soon scoring, diving in at the corner from a Gavin Coombes pass after a maul set them up for a 5-3 lead.
Daly was pivotal to Munster keeping this lead, racing back on 28 minutes to tidy up and deny Nagy after Mike Haley had a clearance kick charged down by Evardi Boshoff, and they were celebrating down the other end of the pitch eight minutes later when replacement Lee Barron drove over at the back of a maul.
Jack Crowley converted and the composed out-half was scoring again in added time, finishing off the break make by Paddy Paterson, his half-back partner. That left them 19-3 up with second-half wind advantage to come. Eight minutes were all they needed for Haley to strike for the bonus point-clinching fourth try.
Ospreys were given a window to save some face with Morgan Morris’ converted try and Jack O’Donoghue’s yellow card, but they couldn’t make inroads and the match petered out to a zero frills conclusion.
Lumpy play
It’s been a harrowing week for Ospreys, and the lack-of-fight way they played against Munster in the opening half of this defeat was a damning reflection of a team that has had the heart ripped from it.
Amid speculation they will lose out in the WRU’s four-down-to-three realignment, the unveiling of star pair Morgan and Lake as new Gloucester signings for next season was sobering.
Gloucester, after all, are a struggling Prem operation, so it’s not as if Morgan and Lake have been snapped up by a best-in-England club. If they were, their loss could be easier to take.
This rejection fed into the team’s lumpy play, which left them 16 points down at the interval after playing with the first-half wind. They were also unable to build pressure in the 10 minutes Munster were down a sin-binned man in the second half.
Ospreys can claim the second half score was 7-7, but the reality was they were a very poor watch.
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Daly’s fresh lease of life
It’s years since Andy Farrell last selected Munster back-three Daly for Ireland, but the recently turned 29-year-old is enjoying a fresh lease of life under his new club coach, Clayton McMillan.
Ospreys away was his eighth start in his team’s nine matches this season and what he contributed in the opening half was invaluable to this victory that keeps Munster in a very healthy league position ahead of next weekend’s visit to Limerick of arch rivals Leinster.
Munster had started awkwardly in Wales, coughing up early penalties, but it was a Daly break that invited a silly, yellow-carded Ospreys trip and that moment was the winning and losing of this match.
A minute later, he was diving in at the corner. Next, he played fireman to douse the flames ignited by a charged down Haley clearance. Plenty of other involvements followed, but a great evening’s work had already been completed with less than half an hour played.
Ospreys’ scrum
It’s tough seeing teams suffer from misfiring set-pieces, as you’d imagine scrum and lineout are areas of the game that can be trained up to a reasonable standard and not be a situation where you don’t know what is going to happen from one play to the next.
Adding to the Ospreys’ opening half despair was how their set-piece issues proved costly. They had lost three of their own lineouts less than 30 minutes in and despite having some early joy at the scrum – for instance, Edwards’ missed shot came from a scrum penalty – it lost its way as the half went on.
Having struggled in the early scrum salvos, Munster hit back on an Ospreys put-in when Jeremy Loughman won a collapse penalty against Rhys Henry. That earned the Irish side their invite to build the pressure that ended with the Barron try that blew out the score with the interval approaching.
Sub tighthead Tom Botha managed a heartening second half riposte, but ultimately even he left unhappy with some of the match-closing calls against the Ospreys.
New-level Nankivell
Munster’s midfield evolution under new boss McMillan gave Tom Farrell the early-season impetus to force his way into Farrell’s Ireland set-up, but his partner Alex Nankivell is the centre now taking things on to a new level.
The 29-year-old New Zealander was integral in leading a defiant Munster defence where they gave up just a single try to the home team Ospreys. He announced himself into the contest with a shut-the-door collision with Boshoff when the Welsh were attacking off a penalty advantage.
However, it was his turnover on his team’s try line, denying the ball-carrying Morris off a 29th-minute scrum, that was his best D moment. His attack wasn’t shabby either, as it was his gallop that set up Haley for the try bonus point early in the second half.
Bottom line, he is a player who is enjoying producing a very consistent level of play that is very much appreciated by the Munster fans. His player of the match award in Bridgend was fully deserved.