ULSTER RUGBY CHALLENGE
Ulster ace eyes Cup joy after insisting he’s underperformed since Ireland call
think of it in terms of honours earned, this most unusual of campaigns could be viewed as something of a second breakthrough season for Ulster prop Eric O’sullivan.
While he first emerged right from the off in 2018-19, coming seemingly from nowhere to feature in 26 of the side’s 30 games and making a huge impression in the run to the Champions Cup quarter-finals, wider recognition has come his way in spades of late.
A first Ireland cap arrived against Scotland back in December, bringing with it the fulfilment of a lifelong goal, while only last week he was named as the starting loosehead on the media-selected Guinness PRO14 Dream Team.
On the basis of these seemingly substantial foundational blocks, it’s been a stellar season.
Yet ahead of Ulster’s Challenge Cup quarter-final visit to Franklin’s Gardens for a meeting with Northampton Saints tolevel morrow night, the man himself feels that he has been searching for his best form.
“It’s a nice acknowledgement,” he said of last week’s latest accolade that saw him selected alongside team-mates John Cooney, Mike Lowry and Marcell Coetzee.
“It wasn’t something I saw coming. It was nice to get it but ultimately it’s about performing week in, week out, so that’s where my focus is.
“It’s been a good year for me, getting my cap was a wonderful achievement for me and it’s something I’ve wanted for so long, but off the back of it I think my performances haven’t been where I’d expect them to be myself.
“You get capped and you want to be getting back there. You want to be at a level where it’s not up for debate, where you just have to be picked.
“I have high standards for myself and I’m probably not hitting where I want to be. It’s been a good year, but if I want more of that I need to be playing to the that’s going to get me back there.”
Pro sport is full of peaks and troughs and if O’sullivan’s journey from Trinity College to the Aviva Stadium, via something of a well-documented flier with a short-handed Ulster ‘A’ side, felt an uninterrupted ascension then such a plateau remains an inevitability.
Still, it can be an unnerving experience for a player still in just his third season as a senior player.
“That’s something I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about,” he said of the search for his best form.
“For me it just comes down to going back to what you perceive as your strengths and doing them well.
“So, for me, I would consider my work rate to be one of my strengths, that’s something that I can fall back on, but as a frontrow, your set-piece is massive.
“As a front-row, your set-piece is always going to be questioned so it’s important to perform there and deliver. That’s definitely somewhere I’m focused on.
“(Then) it’s just having the
confidence to go, ‘You are a good player, you deserve to be here’ and going back to what you know, performing in that and then the rest all feeds into it.
“It’s like that expression that you make your own luck, it’s the same with hard work. You play better when you’re putting the effort in.”
It is not only O’sullivan who has been seeking set-piece answers. When asked recently to assess his team’s successes and failures over the course of the PRO14, head coach Dan Mcfarland marked the scrum a ‘C’.
A passing grade, but, as a former loosehead prop himself, the former Connacht, Glasgow and Scotland forwards specialist is looking for a considerably more effective platform.
Harlequins last week certainly had its encouraging signs and, under Mcfarland’s tutelage, as well as input from the likes of the presently injured Jack Mcgrath, O’sullivan believes a heightened focus is starting to pay off.
“(Mcfarland) has so much knowledge there, he’s been working at it for years,” said O’sullivan.
“He has so much knowledge and I’ve learned so much.
“We’d go through video together, we’d talk about little things where I can improve, little things that’ll make a big difference and it definitely helps.
“Then, as well, we’ve got so many experienced guys in the squad that have been through it so you can get in and talk to them. It’s almost like solving a puzzle, taking bits of what helps where and things like that.
“We’ve gone back to looking at it as an eight. During Covid it’s tough to have meetings and you’re limited time-wise. Maybe the scrum took a hit off the back of that if there were things of greater priority, but we’ve definitely given it more of an emphasis in recent weeks, just getting everyone on the same page.
“Guys individually are still doing some good things but it’s about making sure we’re all on the same platform.”
As they’ll need to remain if they are to enjoy success at the first attempt in the Challenge Cup.
The much-rotated side fielded by Harlequins in the last-16 hardly whetted the appetite for what’s to come in the remainder of the second-tier competition, but should the Saints take greater interest this weekend they’ll require a good performance to overcome them, as would a seemingly revived Montpellier and the winner of London Irish versus Bath.
“This is a competition we want to win,” added O’sullivan. “We’re very ambitious as a group and we want to be consistently competing for championships, but it’s about going out and backing up. It’s all well and good just saying that but we need to perform and that starts with Northampton.
“Northampton are a very good team and the competition is stacked, so you can’t afford to be thinking (ahead), you have to respect the opposition that you’re up against.”