Baloucoune to return stronger: Mcfarland
ULSTER head coach Dan Mcfarland has backed both the province and Robert Baloucoune to bounce back from the cruel injury blow that will see the winger require surgery.
Already out of action for six months thanks to Covid-19 bringing the shutters down on the PRO14 back in March, the player who turns 23 today faces another prolonged spell on the sidelines after a training ground tear of his hamstring.
Scorer of six tries in his last seven starts, the Enniskillen man had forced his way into Ireland camp prior to the Six Nations but his rapid rise through the ranks will remain on pause for what Ulster described as a period of “a number of months”.
“It’s really upsetting and it’s a big blow for us because he’s been looking really good this pre-season,” said Mcfarland of youngster Baloucoune who clearly has a very bright future.
“He is important, there’s no doubt about that.
“He’s got something special that a lot of people would love to have and that’s his speed, but as a player he’s a really good learner, defensively he’s excellent, his speed helps him a lot there, but he’s also a smart learner, smart defender.
“He’s been very physical, he’s been progressing well, but it is what it is. These things happen.
“But he’s a mentally tough guy and he’ll work through that.
“In the meantime, we’re blessed here with a number of backthree players who are equally talented.”
The injury, which occurred in a breakdown drill over the past week, will likely see players such as Craig Gilroy, Louis Ludik and Matt Faddes share the load opposite Jacob Stockdale with Will
Addison also out injured.
In another blow yesterday, flanker Sean Reidy will miss four weeks himself with a calf injury but, in better news, EPCR have confirmed that new signing Alby Mathewson will be eligible for next month’s Champions Cup quarter-final with Toulouse in France despite already featuring for Munster during this season’s competition.
Fellow addition Ian Madigan is also permitted to feature having appeared for his former club Bristol only in the Challenge Cup this season.
NOW more than ever, Ulster know that if they are to enjoy a successful end to this longest of seasons, it will be as a squad not a team.
On the eve of their return, successive injury updates have ravaged a panel on ice for the past six months, first losing skipper Iain Henderson and Irish international Will Addison to the treatment room and, yesterday, seeing both winger Rob Baloucoune and flanker Sean Reidy join them thanks to issues sustained in training.
As such, when the side take to the field against Connacht in the Aviva Stadium on Sunday afternoon (4.30pm kick-off ), they will do so without four men who surely would be inked onto the team sheet of Dan Mcfarland under any other circumstances.
Otherwise, the head coach will not over-think selection. His counterpart in Galway, Andy Friend, suggested yesterday that he may well select entirely different sides for the two rounds of derbies that will precede the PRO14 semi-finals but Mcfarland believes he doesn’t have the luxury of looking further ahead.
While it would take a wholly unlikely set of circumstances for Ulster to miss out on the last-four — they resume the campaign nine points ahead of Glasgow with only 10 left to play for — it seems the team for this opening weekend will reflect the fact that, as we sit today, their spot is yet to be copper-fastened.
“The bottom line is we have to take each game as it comes,” he said.
“This first game against Connacht is a game we need to win. Mathematically we need two points, but that’s not the way we’re looking at it. We need to win this game and we’ll take it from there.
“If we’re in a position where we play Connacht and manage to get a win, which will be hard enough in and of itself, we’re obviously playing in a semi-final.
“If you win that, you’re playing in a final and then a (European) quarter-final. Those are your five games.
“If we get to a position where we’re playing five games in a row,
I tell you we’ll not have any issues going into the quarter-final and we’re not going to have any issues going into a semi-final.
“We’ve got fresh bodies and hungry bodies here and we’ve got enough talent and depth to make the adjustments we need within those games as it comes along.
“If we manage to get what we need to get done against Connacht this weekend, we may be able to rotate the squad a little bit and whether we want to try out some other guys to find out who’s going to be in a position to fight for a semi-final place, but that’s getting a bit ahead of ourselves. We have got to win a game this week and that is where our focus is.”
When Ulster last played at Irish Rugby HQ, it was a game with sufficient colour, intensity and volume to remind of all that was good in these Irish derby fixtures.
Set against the backdrop of a deadly pandemic, empty stands and unprecedented circumstances, that European quarter-final against Leinster some 17 months ago will feel a world away on Sunday.
Having trained more than usual in an otherwise empty Kingspan Stadium, while also used to playing sparsely-attended games in cavernous stadiums like Murrayfield, Ulster have spoken of “bringing their own atmosphere” throughout the lengthy break but it may well be harder to mitigate against rust.
As the sport has returned in New Zealand, then Australia and most recently England, the eagerly-anticipated contests have proven to be something of a slow burn, even in Super Rugby Aotearoa which ultimately
produced a standard not seen in club rugby since the heyday of the Heineken Cup.
While the long lay-off is one aspect, stricter interpretation of laws have also played a significant part.
Out in New Zealand, there were 60 combined penalties over the course of two games in their opening weekend, while games like Harlequins versus Sale in the Premiership’s own restart also saw players falling foul of the new need to roll towards the sideline when leaving the tackle area.
Ulster have brought referees into training on numerous occasions of late, most recently on Saturday, to try and get ahead of the curve.
“The notable thing about the first round is the staccato nature of the games,” said Mcfarland (above) of the rugby he’s watched during lockdown. “It’s as you’d expect in the first pre-season game of the season, the error rate is high, guys aren’t anticipating the speed of the game and there’s a little lack of cohesion.
“What you’d term as rustiness has been seen across the board. We forget that Super Rugby, which looks like a great spectacle now, started off pretty ropey. There was a lot of kicking in the first rounds which didn’t look great and that is pretty unusual for New Zealand rugby. That was one element that really stuck out.
“The interpretation of the laws is the other, there was a big struggle down in Super Rugby with getting used to that and how the referees were going to interpret their use of the laws.
“It wasn’t as big an issue in the Premiership at the weekend, I didn’t think. There was a little bit of disparity between referees, but there was in (New Zealand)
as well.
“Super Rugby Australia was refereed completely differently to New Zealand, so from our perspective, as a team approaching a match, adaptability becomes huge. “Frank (Murphy) is refereeing our game at the weekend. It could be, even though we’ve spoken with Frank and the Irish referees a lot over this last period and we think we understand where they’re going, that we’re not getting that quite right.
“So our ability to adapt to that quickly will be essential, as it will be to adapt tactically to how we’re playing at any given time in the match as well.”