Ulster must learn and move on: Mcfarland
Boss determined to regain that winning feeling at Sportsground
“I T’ S not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up.”
There’s a Vince Lombardi quote available for just about any scenario going, but this one does, perhaps, seem apt after two straight defeats have had to be stomached around Kingspan Stadium, albeit by narrow margins.
That pair of losses have also effectively ended Ulster’s ambitions in the Champions Cup, with last Saturday’s endgame at Gloucester being particularly hard to digest as Dan Mcfarland’s side threw the match away as the clock ticked towards, and made its way into, the red.
As this certainly wasn’t the case on the previous occasion they shipped two straight games — at the back-end of the last campaign when Leinster were the victors in the Guinness PRO14 final before Toulouse garrotted Ulster in Europe’s last-eight — you would wonder what impact these recent reverses have had as Ulster now prepare to face Connacht in Galway, a side they have lost to away from home on the last four occasions.
Understandably, Ulster will be particularly eager to reverse this trend, and especially so as they have never suffered three straight losses in Mcfarland’s time, never mind that the head coach played and coached at the western province and will want to get one over on them.
There is also the matter of Ulster having won eight from eight in the initial part of the PRO14 and that Connacht, also in good league form, have also experienced similar hurt from their pair of Champions Cup matches, with the pain of losing out to Bristol, at the Sportsground, still very fresh in their minds.
Anyway, it’s now how Ulster “get up” from being knocked down that will tell us much about Mcfarland’s squad as they face closing out 2020 in a place which has brought them so little comfort in recent times, with the side last having won in Galway back on Boxing Day in 2015.
Lose again and Ulster will have suffered their first trio of defeats since the grim days of 2018 before Mcfarland arrived that summer, and the games to come are also fraught with danger as they have Munster at home and Leinster away to complete the tricky festive series of interpros.
“It’s all context driven,” was how Mcfarland described dealing with wrong results. “It depends on the manner of defeat, what you’ve got to learn (from that) and it depends on what the next game is. There is no blueprint to how it works other than the fact that you take your learnings. That’s how it is.
“The bottom line is that you have to be able to deal with it and move on so that you can focus on what you’ve got to do (next).”
As for the outside noise that Ulster’s eight from eight in beating diluted sides in the initial block of PRO14 games has suggested a misleading sense of their quality, Mcfarland had little to offer on such a theory.
“We were a whisker away from having 10 points in the Champions Cup but we have three, the margins are so fine,” he said.
“The fact is that we won eight games and got six bonus-point wins (in the PRO14). We can’t be in bad form, can we?”
The knocks come, it’s how you bounce back that matters.