It’s been as tough a run of games as Ulster could have asked for over the past three weeks and, while on paper it gets a little easier this Friday, an inter-provincial clash with Munster is hardly something to help them ease into their short Christmas break.
The southern province are the opponents for an Ulster side beaten by United Rugby Championship leaders Leinster, European champions Toulouse, and fellow crack French outfit Bordeaux in recent weeks.
A month after parting ways with head coach Graham Rowntree, Munster go into Friday’s clash a point and a place behind Ulster in the URC table, and off the back of a Champions Cup defeat to Castres that saw them pick up more significant injuries.
Even so, an inter-pro will always be an inter-pro, and with another to come on December 28 against Galway in Connacht, Ulster forwards coach Jimmy Duffy doesn’t foresee any drop in intensity on the return to domestic competition.
“I think a lot of the time in Ireland you’ll have a gameplan but you kind of get out of the lads’ way because they bring their own niggle [to an inter-pro],” he said.
“Munster are very, very proud. Those guys are starting to put some real patterns together so they can cause you a lot of problems around the contact area.
“The set-piece is strong as well, they’ve got some really exciting backs, so we’re clued in in terms of how good they are, but inter-pros will bring their own spark.”
While Munster won the first of their Champions Cup double-header at home to Stade Francais before the Castre defeat, Ulster emerged from their European clashes with French opposition empty-handed, battered and bruised, with a number of players on the treatment table ahead of Friday’s Kingspan Stadium clash.
Although they followed their 61-21 defeat in Toulouse with a 40-19 home loss to Bordeaux, the latter match provided plenty of positives, with Ulster leading after an hour before being blown away with 26 unanswered points in the final quarter.
“To go from the Toulouse performance to being in a position to win the game on 63 minutes – that’s the encouraging thing in a week,” said Duffy.
“We have a group that bounce [back] and we have a group that can perform and that’s what we’re excited about.
“We were quite proud of stuff we did up front and in attack, and the fight we showed in defence. To keep those guys silent for the best part of three-quarters of the game was pretty good.
“We kept them defending for a large periods and then when we [were defending] the lads fought for each other in defence.
“There were elements where we felt we hurt Bordeaux and we could have punished them a little bit more on a couple of occasions in the first half in particular.
“We created quite a few opportunities and it would been nice to maybe get one or two more and if we’d got one or two more we would have been a much healthier position.
“There’s always areas to fix and there’s a lot of honesty in the meeting room, but we’re very much a club that’s going after the gold and the positives in the group.”
But the fact remains that Ulster are on a four-game losing run going back to the URC clash with the Cardiff before the Autumn Nations Series when they coughed up a 19-0 half-time lead.
Add to that shipping more than a century of points in the past two games and it would be understandable if morale around the Kingspan Stadium was sitting somewhere barely above the surface of the 3G pitch. Not so, says Duffy.
“It’s been pretty good,” he said when asked yesterday how morale is.
“We went through a review yesterday and then we had a review/preview this morning – just kind of going after the positives, really.
“We’ve all spoken about it being a young group and giving it time but they’re still ambitious, they want to perform and they’ve seen last year’s French finalists and the European champions in the last couple of weekends.
“That’s that’s where you learn, that’s where you get burnt and you get better. It’s not doom and gloom in there by any means.”
