AS THE REST of Europe sat back and awaited the outcome of the French clubs’ crisis meeting on Friday to determine what to do with the Heineken Champions Cup, Ulster head coach Dan McFarland did his best to ignore it.
There was a WhatsApp message into a group chat about it, while he couldn’t completely ignore the eventual decision by the French clubs to withdraw from any games they were playing in the UK this weekend due to the rise in cases of the Omicron variant of Covid-19, but for the most part he avoided the speculation.
Fortunate to be facing Northampton Saints rather than last week’s opponents Clermont, and with the English side already in Belfast for Friday night’s game, despite all the chatter elsewhere the game was always going ahead. Where the concern lay was what the game would mean in the context of the competition long-term.
After all, the future of this year’s competition has been thrown into doubt, with seven games now to be rearranged from this week alone. With no free weekends between now and the end of the season, fitting those fixtures in will require one of two things: domestic rescheduling, or the players’ welfare nightmare of midweek games.
While behind the scenes EPCR grapple with that issue, in the meantime Ulster’s game with the Saints went ahead last night, the northern province triumphing 27-22 to go two from two and move top of Group A with nine points and all but book their place in the last-16, however that will now look.
“I think that first and foremost we’re really grateful as a club that we’ve been lucky enough to be able to play two games and post two results,” said McFarland after watching his side run in four tries at Kingspan Stadium to back up last weeks’ victory at Clermont.
“There are a lot of clubs out there with the uncertainty of not playing and the anguish of having games postponed or awarded to the opposition, that’s a really unfortunate position.
“It could slap us in the face at any point. I know that, it’s probably coming. We’re lucky enough that we’ve got two games done. Nine points from two games is a decent place to be but we’re only halfway through the pool stages and we’ll turn our attention to the interpros now before we’re back in Europe.
“It was definitely sad last year that those two rounds were discarded. There’s so much in life that’s disrupted at the moment. This is the centre of our world but the centre of so many peoples’ worlds are disrupted on a week-to-week basis.
“It’s frustrating, it’s annoying. We’re subject to decision making from people who have huge amounts of responsibility around public health making complex social decisions. We have to go with the flow.
“We’ve all our opinions and the right to voice those opinions and to influence if we think those opinions are valid but ultimately we’ll plough through and, God willing, we’ll all get through safe.”
Unsurprisingly, too, the former Connacht prop had a fair degree of sympathy for those coaches who saw games against French opposition postponed before the united Gallic approach of withdrawing from this week’s fixtures, thereby forfeiting a 28-0 scoreline when they could have had their game rescheduled instead.
“Would I be frustrated? I’d be really frustrated. There’s so much in the world at the moment that you can’t control and it’s really important, the Champions Cup.
You want the opportunity to actually play,” he added.
“I see that and I know it could be happening to us in four or five weeks, one way or the other, either us getting the five points or someone getting the five against us.
“I don’t know how it’s going to work out. I don’t know what’s fair and what’s not but I do know I’d be frustrated in that situation.”
As for Ulster themselves, given the wider implications there was little chat about the win over the Saints itself, but what McFarland did say left you assured that there were mixed feelings stemming from a bonus point win that was far closer than it perhaps should have been.
Despite out-scoring their visitors by three tries to none in the first half, the gap at the break was just seven points. Even when they pulled 15 points clear early in the second half, still the result was not secure as tries from Alex Mitchell and Courtnall Skosan made things nervy in the final few minutes.
The Saints lived off the scraps Ulster were feeding them, particularly errors straight off the restarts from their tries, and McFarland was keen to see those tidied up for their return to league action against Connacht on St Stephen’s Day.
“We put three tries on the board, nice counter-attack, nice phase play, and on each occasion we were scoring and they were kicking into our half, we weren’t being accurate with our exiting and it was giving them an opportunity to get a foothold and put points over, and that’s what they did,” he lamented.
“In fact, I think a massive chunk of their points came in the three, four minutes after we scored. That is very unusual for us. In the last three or four games we’ve been excellent at exiting our half, really precise.
“But we did odd things today: little offloads, losing the ball in contact, trying to get the ball away from mauls and giving up possession. That was a key reason why we weren’t able to maintain control on the game.”
McFarland was not able to provide a detailed medical report after the game, revealing Ireland second row Iain Henderson and centre Stuart McCloskey will go for further opinions on ankle and hamstring injuries respectively.
