O’sullivan: Let’s use fan ban to our advantage
ULSTER’S Eric O’sullivan believes his side must stamp their authority on the game when they travel to Gloucester tomorrow (3.15pm).
The province head to Kingsholm knowing that they have to seize the initiative with their Champions Cup campaign significantly dented by their defeat to Toulouse at home last week.
“What’s huge for us is making sure we’re playing our game, not being influenced by the team we’re playing or how they like to play rugby,” stressed newly capped Irish international O’sullivan.
“We have to go and play with our philosophy. Obviously that changes a bit with no fans, it’s a completely different atmosphere but I think that makes it a bit easier to go and enforce your own game on things.
“There’s not those periods where the crowd can lift the home team. So as long as you’re getting your stuff right, it makes those away fixtures a bit less daunting. Once we go there, we just have to put our game forward, that’s our plan.”
Ulster will name their team for the trip to the West Country this afternoon with Marcell Coetzee and Sam Carter having emerged as doubts after last weekend’s reverse.
That defeat to the four-time European champions was just the second reverse at home endured by O’sullivan in his Ulster career, ending as it did a 25-game unbeaten run for Dan Mcfarland’s men in Belfast.
O’sullivan admits it was a strange feeling to come off the Kingspan Stadium field beaten.
“It was very weird,” he reflected. “I was buzzing coming in on Friday night. A home game, a big French team coming to town, a wet night; you were kind of thinking the stage was set, it couldn’t be any better.
“That (the loss) happens, we knew it would at some stage. It’s important that we start putting the wins back-to-back now and build another one. Good teams come but we don’t want anyone thinking this is an easy place to come but we’ll be keen to put a few wins in back-to-back.
“We’re disappointed. Big games like that you always want to win, it doesn’t matter who we’re playing, we back ourselves to win those kinds of games.
“We were disappointed not to get the result we needed but it was a good performance from us, we had our opportunities there where we could have maybe got a couple more scores.
“We have to take our learnings from it. We’re going into a huge game for us now this weekend so we couldn’t afford to dwell on it too long. We have to suck it up and get on with it.
“We’ve to go out to try and win this weekend anyway. There’s a big focus on trying to put out a good performance and trying to get the win. It’s a tough place to go but with a good week’s training under our belt, we’ll be ready to go again.”
Before the big game, Ulster’s A side will be back in action this afternoon, taking on the Connacht Eagles at The Sportsground in Galway with kick-off set for 1pm.
Having beaten their Munster counterparts last weekend, the side today shows five changes with Adam Mcburney, Nick Timoney and Ethan Mcilroy all dropping out of the panel.
Nathan Doak will get the nod at scrum-half having been on the bench last week and he’ll team up at half-back with Bill Johnston, who is again at 10. Andrew Warwick comes in to start at loosehead.