Munster acutely aware of the attacking threat posed by the Fijian second row.

Munster play their first home game of the Champions Cup on Saturday as Ronan O’Gara’s Racing 92 side make the trip to Thomond Park for round 2 of the competition.

The Paris outfit is littered with international talent such as Dan Carter, Patrick Lambie and Joe Rokocoko to name a few, but one of their stand out players of the first round victory over Leicester was Fijian second row Leone Nakarawa.

The incredibly athletic Nakarawa is well known for his exceptional off-loading talents as well his elusive footwork, which makes defending the 6 ft 6 lock such a tough task for opposing sides. If Munster are to register a first win of the competition following last week’s draw in France them stopping Nakarawa and the line breaks generated from his offloads is going to be a key part

Racing got their Champions cup campaign off to the perfect start last Saturday as the Parisians defeated Leicester 22-18 thanks to tries from Bernard Le Roux, Teddy Thomas and of course Nakarawa.

However the stand out stat of the game is that the 29 year old Fijian managed 10 offloads against the English side. To put this into context, the player with the second most offloads was winger Teddy Thomas with a whopping two. Click below to see his offloads against Leicester last week.

At this week’s press briefing Munster captain Peter O’Mahony is acutely aware of Nakarawa’s threat but says Munster can’t afford to get fixated on the Fijian.

“We’ve played against him a fair bit. It would be silly of us to say we’re going to stop him off loading, I think he had 10 at the weekend but it certainly will be mentioned in or defence sessions. Every team that come up against him have to defend and play against him. He’ll certainly be mentioned but there’s 14 others who are excellent so we’ve to worry about them as well.”

Zebo, who returned to competitive action at full back on Sunday, echoed his captained sentiments on the defensive situation that Munster are facing on Saturday. Go low and you might take him down but you are allowing for an easy offload, go high to prevent the offload and whilst you might eventually make the tackle the likelyhood is the it will be well beyond the gain line and go forward ball the French side. Zebo believes Munster will need to keep their defensive shape and structure.

“I think we’ll probably just try and stay together and defend him as a collective and try not to gang up on him too much and lose our shape. The thing is to, whoever is the one to tackle him is to get him to the ground as quick as possible so the off load threat is a bit less but it’s part of his game it’s built into him, it the main asset he has to his game so you’re not going to stop it but you can try and nullify it as best you can, so just try and get him to deck as soon as possible”

Munster are no strangers to the Fiji sevens player, who was involved in their famous gold medal win at the Rio Olympics last summer, having faced the 29 year old last season in the Champion Cup as well as on a number of occasions when he lined out for the Glasgow Warriors. The clip below shows a bit more of what we can expect on Saturday.