Gavin Coombes keeping the faith in Munster’s progress despite Toulouse defeat

Munster threw all that they could against Toulouse, as is backed up by almost every metric. They made almost three times as many passes and more or less twice as many carries for twice as many metres, but for all their endeavour and positive intentions, couldn’t make one line break against a Toulouse side who made 143 tackles compared to 82 by the home side.

Whereas Toulouse were often content to kick for territory and increasingly played in the right areas of the pitch, one of the game’s striking features was Mike Haley’s counter-attacking. The fullback was Munster’s leading carrier with 14, for 143 metres as well, which was far more than any Toulouse player and in striking contrast to Thomas Ramos, who made only five carries for 16 metres.

The next highest totals for carries by Munster players with 12 apiece were Joey Carbery and Gavin Coombes, the latter for 40 hard-earned metres, which was more than any Toulouse player with the exception of Antoine Dupont.

The number eight from Skibbereen appears to have found his mojo again but was struck by one particular aspect of the French side’s game.

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“I think just physically. They’re just so big and their maul is very good. Physicality, and they have special players like Dupont and [Romain] Ntamack. When they see space, they can get there. There will be a lot of learnings for us in how to defend those things.”

Coombes agreed with Graham Rowntree in maintaining Munster could take encouragement from their performance, although given he was sitting alongside his head coach, the number eight couldn’t have done otherwise.

“Definitely, there’s aspects of our attack where it looked like we could have broken them. Maybe our breakdown let us down a small bit at times, defensively we got after them but one or two times our discipline cost us. There’s definitely things we can work on, aspects we can learn from and take away that were good for us.

“Everyone is getting used to it. It’s a completely different system to the way we were running things the last couple of seasons, so these things take time.

“It’s showing week on week that we’re improving, we need to stick at it. There’s no point changing what we’re doing just because we’ve one loss. We’ve to stick at it and back what we’re doing.”

As the fog rolled in remorselessly throughout the course of the game and these two giants of European rugby went toe to toe for a ninth time, the surreal backdrop made it seem even more like a step back in time.

“Yeah, they were tough,” said Coombes of the conditions. “Obviously for a back three in the fog, it’s tough to see the ball. But you know, I think it just goes back to our mistakes, giving them access. No matter what the weather conditions are, if you do that teams like Toulouse are going to punish you. As Wig [Graham Rowntree] was saying, we need to go out and improve on that during the week and bring it into next week.

“If you look at it we actually played the game plan that we’ve been applying all season. I think at times our attack was very good and it was one mistake and we’re turning the ball over and they’ve players that are going to go and take advantage of that and put you back in your own 22.

“So, I don’t think the conditions had too much of an impact on the way we attacked. I feel like we created opportunities, we just had to be better at taking them.”