FOR ULSTER, THIS weekend’s Champions Cup qualification permutations are straightforward. For their influential centre Stuart McCloskey, so too are the motivations.
“I don’t really want to be playing Challenge Cup and I don’t think the other guys really want to be playing it either so that’s a pretty big carrot,” said the 31-year-old who this week was again called up to Andy Farrell’s Ireland squad for the Six Nations.
“I don’t want to be playing with that purple ball when we go into the last-16.
“I’d much prefer to be playing Champions Cup last-16 against a big team and in a big fixture.”
Much has been said about how the Champions Cup format now takes an entire pool stage to pare down 24 teams into 16 but, going into the concluding round of fixtures, Ulster are in danger of becoming one of the unfortunate eight who will fall by the wayside.
Fail to beat Harlequins at the Twickenham Stoop on Saturday afternoon and, barring an unfathomable slip from Racing 92 at home to Cardiff, Dan McFarland’s men will drop into the second-tier Challenge Cup for just the second time in their history.
Travelling to the team presently second in the English Premiership is hardly an ideal scenario for a must-win contest but the northern province find themselves in this precarious position after a somewhat humbling loss to Toulouse on their own patch last weekend.
“Toulouse are pretty good, aren’t they?” replied McCloskey when asked for his reflections of the 48-24 defeat that ended a three-game winning run.
“We went in knowing they are a very good team with world class players (but) I think when we look back on it, some of the tries they scored were probably a bit too easy.”
With the visitors crossing the whitewash seven times in total, McCloskey was particularly irked by the French side’s third when Anthony Jelonch was allowed a huge run off a goal-line drop-out.
“I’d have liked to have made them work a bit more for some of their tries,” he added. “The goal-line drop-out, you do that at school level.
“It was more deflating. I thought they were very, very good and obviously there’s a slight gulf in class there.
“If you look at the teams, I’m sure their budget is probably double our budget if not more, so there’s always going to be a bit of a difference there.
“But I think most of the time in the big European games at home, especially against French opposition, we usually turn up.
“It just felt like we didn’t really turn up and fire a shot, at least for the first 50-odd minutes of the game so that was the disappointing part.”
Having played their way into trouble, Ulster can at least take confidence not just from their winning run prior to that rude awakening, but from the fact that they have delivered in such scenarios over recent seasons.
Leicester Tigers, Bath and Sale Sharks have all been beaten under similar circumstances since Dan McFarland took over in 2018.
“We won three pretty good games before that so one bad game doesn’t make a season, does it?” McCloskey said.
“Hopefully we’ll bounce back and beat Quins and no one will remember that Toulouse game come the last 16 and quarter-finals later on.
“We have done in previous (years) for European stuff so hopefully we have a bit of a bounce back this week.
“We played well the three weeks before — well, if not brilliantly — and we got the results so we’re not too far away.
“It’s probably a bit deflating right now from where I thought we had been, coming back down to Earth from the weekend.
“I think we’ll turn it round. There’s a lot of enthusiasm in the group, a lot of dejected guys obviously from that result at the weekend, but hopefully we’ll take that the right way and turn up on Saturday against Quins.”
In what is essentially a knock-out game before the knock-outs, for the first time this season Ulster know that if they don’t, there will be no way back.
