McFarland: We’ll take the learnings from this period

Ulster left Stade Ernest-Wallon yesterday having been dispatched 36-8 by European powerhouses, Toulouse, in the Heineken Champions Cup Quarter-Final and Ulster’s Head Coach, Dan McFarland, gave his reaction. “It’s a similar story in terms of having opportunities and not finishing them,” McFarland said. “Toulouse’s first try came when James Hume was down on the floor injured. It’s difficult enough to defend with 15 and with 14, we just couldn’t do that. We then missed an opportunity to go into the lead with a gilt-edged chance for a try, then passing the ball into touch just before half-time in our own half set Toulouse up to score. We were already under pressure then and in the second half, we just made too many mistakes and gave Toulouse the opportunity to get into the game.” On Ulster’s performance over the course of the last five games since the resumption of rugby, the Head Coach acknowledges it was a tall order when playing all five games away from home – three of which being knock-out games. “When you look at the teams we’ve been playing against, we’ve played five away games, two against Leinster, one against Connacht, one against Edinburgh in a Semi-Final, and one against Toulouse in a Quarter-Final. You look at the results and even when you’re playing well, you’re holding onto the seat of your pants, hoping to win. “The sour note is that I haven’t managed to get the team into a position where we’re playing as well as we can. Given the five away matches and the competition we’re play against, it doesn’t take us to be off by much to not win those games.” In trying to pin down what went wrong for Ulster, he admits they haven’t been as clinical as they should be in capitalising on opportunities to score. “We won against Edinburgh in great form for chunks of that match, but we haven’t been stringing it together. A lot of the game against Toulouse and Leinster, our set piece was really good and that has been improving. For whatever reason, when we’ve had the opportunities, we haven’t been finishing them. “It compounds itself; you struggle for a while to finish off tries, there’s a little bit of jitteriness and you lose a bit of confidence. There’s a snowball effect and we saw that against Toulouse. In the first half and as the game went on, we opened them up with massive opportunities and didn’t quite complete like the way we played in the past.” McFarland now has a short period of time to prepare the squad before the start of the 2020-21 season, and will give the squad a few days to recover after their bruising encounter. “We’ll take a couple of down days now as we’ve got a lot of battered bodies in very high-profile games. Guys have put a lot of effort into that and we’ll come back in and do a bit of training, review as support staff, review as players, and take the learnings we can from this period and move on. “I anticipate the next period of games will be an opportunity for us to try and broaden our squad. Starting with these last five games, we’ve mainly focused on the key men in the team and now is an opportunity to look at the guys coming through to see if they can stake a claim. The nature of the competition allows us to do that.” In reviewing the 2019-20 season, McFarland maintains that Ulster have progressed, and the squad will continue to build on that as we quickly go into the new campaign. “How are we going to review the season? The bottom line is that prior to lockdown, we were playing really well. We earned ourselves a place in the Guinness PRO14 Semi-Final, we earned ourselves a place in the Heineken Champions Cup Quarter-Final with five wins in the pool stages. We won a Semi-Final away from home and played in my first Final as a Head Coach - the first for a lot of players as well. “When we look back on the season, taking aside the level of performance we’ve had for a chunk of the games we’ve been playing in here, we have to say we did a pretty good job. As far as next season is concerned, we’ll focus on that, but it’ll be the same process. We want to win silverware as a club, we think we’re a club that can achieve that.”