FROM THE FIRST day Dan McFarland slipped on his Ulster Rugby hat, the message to be driven throughout the squad was clear.
The ‘fight for every inch’ mentality was about leaving no stone unturned and no match counted as beyond them until the final whistle came.
Crucially, the credo has been maintained, enacted and instilled. So it is about more than just commendable words and slogans in the northern province. It has been evident in their performances; from a last-minute Nick Timoney try when they were en route to defeat with 14 men at home to Connacht, to the grim determination shown to hold onto a narrow lead against Racing or the fightbacks to draw with Benetton and win in Leicester having trailed 10-0 half-time.
However, while that mantra has brought Ulster this far, nobody in the province is under the illusion that work-rate alone will be enough to topple the reigning European champions on their own turf.
“That attitude is only a foundation. It’s something you can build on,” McFarland said after naming his team yesterday.
“It has to be there, it will be there. But it has to be more than that.
“We’ll need some of our best play in our defence to slow down the speed of their attack. And in terms of our attacking intent, we’ll have to make sure we hold onto the ball, we’ll have to make sure we’re incisive in terms of breaking them down.
“The effort and fight for every inch mentality has to be a given, then we’ll have other stuff on top of that.”
Earlier this week, Rory Best spoke with a similar sentiment. To make Europe’s final four, Ulster will have to do more than show their brightest patches. They will have to string together every element to make a complete performance. But if they can drag Leinster into a scrap and a one-score game, they won’t shirk the finishing touch.
“You look back at the season,” said Best, “and there were four games where we’ve won two, drawn two in the last minute so it sort of says that we are not short of character, we are not short on guts.
“It’s just whether we can cope with that pressure valve. We know we are going to have the character and guts, but can we make sure that we have the precision when it counts?”
The Ireland and Ulster captain added: “How can we attack them? How can we manufacture things to create chances? We know we are not going to get an infinite amount of chances. There is going to be at most a handful of chances and, to beat Leinster, you’ve got to take almost every one of them.
“You’re talking about being in the game with 10 to go, we’ve also looked at bits of our games this season and said look: here are bits from, whatever, 10 minutes from eight games where we’ve shown how good we can be.
“Well, the challenge is, can we piece all that together to produce 80 minutes?
“Because it’s going to take that.
Teams that beat Leinster are the teams that live with them for 80 minutes and don’t have that momentary lapse of concentration. It sounds very tough, and it is, that’s why they don’t lose many games.”
Aside from the personnel involved, the returning internationals, an injury crisis at 13 and concern for Iain Henderson, McFarland says the shape of Ulster’s preparation week has been nothing out of the ordinary. But his squad know they are chasing an extraordinary result, and they have upped the tempo of their approach.
Ahead of the biggest game of his first year as a head coach, McFarland stresses the need to not boil over with enthusiasm early in the week and instead ‘simmer along’ and hit the markers of the process along the way.
Ulster will have a coherent plan to disrupt Leinster, though McFarland was coy when it was suggested that – with Best, Marcell Coetzee and Jordi Murphy in tow – they could take an approach similar to how Bath frustrated the double winners at the Rec.
“I think the big thing to come out of that is, when Leinster play with consistently fast ball you are in trouble. You can get knocked down and not be able to get back up.
“That is a risk for any side playing against Leinster, One of the things we will have to be able to do is slow down the pace of their play.
“How we go about that, well Bath did it by having two opensides going after the breakdown, whether we do that tomorrow remains to be seen.”
The odds have been stacked against them, so Ulster will be glad when the preludes are done and it’s time to roll up the sleeves.
