IT SOUNDED FUNNY at first. But listening back, Rory Best is deadly serious when he says his last ‘purely fitness session’ is well behind him.
Thanks to last season’s documentary following Tommy Bowe’s return to fitness, any sadist who wishes to see Ulster’s strength and conditioning man Jonny Davis put players through hell and back can do just that.
Throw Davis’ close scrutiny in with Ulster’s mini-crisis at the start of the season and you have the hallmarks of a very uncomfortable time for Best.
“It’s difficult now,” Best tells TheScore.ie. “It’s not particularly where you want to be. You want to be out playing, but you need to get it done, you need to get yourself in physical condition so you’ll still be going strong at the end of the season.”
Where he wants to be, of course, is on the field in his number two jersey. So his voice lightens as he explains that he is fit and available for selection when Treviso come looking for another Irish scalp at Ravenhill on Friday. Having claimed a draw in Belfast last season, and put 34 and 29 points on the board in consecutive wins against Munster, the time for damning this Italian club with feigned praise is over.
“Hopefully last Friday was the last purely fitness session I’ll do for a while. We’ll try to tag in bits and pieces for the rest of the season. But in terms of no game and a hard fitness session, we’re into the games now and the nicer side of rugby, actually getting on the pitch at a packed house at Ravenhill.”
Under-performed
The Paddy Jackson-inspired win over Connacht last Saturday propelled the northern province from the bottom to half way up an underdeveloped Pro12 table. Despite there being only one win on the board, Best only points to the opening-night defeat to the Dragons as a game where his team-mates under-performed.
“Glasgow was just one of those games,” he says of the last-ditch 12 – 13 home defeat. “I think we played very well and created a lot of chances, then just didn’t put them away.
“The result was disappointing, but I think the performance had a lot of positives and we probably took a bit of that into the Connacht game which got us across the line. We made sure we got that first win of the season, we didn’t want to be going – no matter how pleased you were with aspects of a performance – into this Treviso game having not won a game yet.”
“We talked a lot, and put a lot of pressure on ourselves to be better in training, accurate in training and that will transfer onto the pitch come match time.
“I think that was starting to show against Connacht, there’s always going to be mistakes, you’re never going to be 100% perfect, but unless you really strive to be as close to perfect as you can be, you’re never going to know how close you can get to it.
“It was a big step up in terms of execution against Connacht and it was a very tricky fixture, they’d have been fancying their chances of beating us after two losses. It took a lot of character and guts to grind out the win, and the way we dominated the second half showed the confidence is coming back.”
