We caught up with Ulster Captain, Johann Muller, who gave us his thoughts on the Heineken Cup Quarter-Final:
On ERC games…
You definitely go into ERC games with a different mind-set, purely because it is a tougher competition. There are more international players present in the Heineken Cup and if you don’t raise your game you will struggle as a team, so I think from a mental and physical point of view you need to step it up and I think that we have been lucky this season and we have managed to do that, especially in those big away games against Montpellier and Leicester Tigers. It has been eight weeks now since a Heineken Cup game and all of a sudden we have got to make a massive step up into a quarter final - but we have all of our players back from injury and from international duty so we are quite happy with our preparation and are looking forward to Saturday.
On the season so far…
There have been a lot of highlights, we are happy with how we are sitting in the league and with our performance in Europe but things haven’t always gone as we wanted them to. We had a good run of wins there but we haven’t been playing exactly the way we want to but I think that is the quality of a great team, even though we haven’t been playing the best we can, we are still finding ways to win. This is the business end of the season and we have put ourselves in good positions in the league and in Europe leading into a really important phase.
On the Saracens' Team…
Looking back 12 months when we played them at Twickenham they outplayed us in every single area of the game and they will come to Ravenhill with the same mind-set. They have had an unbelievable run lately so I would expect them to come here full of confidence and looking to get a victory at Ravenhill but it is up to us to make sure that doesn’t happen.
On this year compared to last…
Last year was tough, we had so many injuries. From my own perspective, I had only played one game before the quarter final at Twickenham. The Friday that we flew down to London I remember being so sore from the previous game but this year we have been lucky from an injury point of view, everybody is back, everybody has been playing together and I think that we have learnt from last year and will not make the same mistakes.
On the occasion…
Everything is becoming a last for me now but from a personal point of view I truly believe it is not about me. It is about this organisation, I have been here for four years and I have seen how this team, club and stadium has developed and that really excites me. We are just at the starting line, this is not a short term project it is more like 10/20 year project and for me as an individual to be a part of the building phase is something really special and I hope it is not my last Heineken Cup game, I hope to play another two more but at the end of the day we have got to go out there as a team and enjoy ourselves, enjoy Ravenhill, enjoy a full house and have a wonderful evening… At home in a Heineken Cup quarter final for the first time in 15 years, it doesn’t get any bigger than that!