PROVINCES WITH ASPIRATIONS of silverware know they will have to shift through the gears pretty swiftly to ensure they are up to speed for the busiest of business ends to a season.
Whether battling for the Pro14 honours or on a European front too, provinces must approach the weeks ahead as season-defining matches. The more you win, the more you play. The more you play, the tougher it gets.
That arrangement suits Ulster head coach Dan McFarland just fine. And ahead of an encounter with his former employers in Connacht, he is ready to embrace the need to test the depths of his squad throughout what he must hope will be a run of six massive games in six straight weeks.
After Sunday’s inter-pro opener, they will meet Leinster for the first time on 29 August and then likely pitch up in the semi-final on 5 September. The Pro14 final is set for 12 September, eight days out from the northern province’s big European Champions Cup bout away to Toulouse.
If they manage to play their way out of a rest week between now and European semi-final weekend on 26 September, it will have been a tremendous second season for McFarland in Belfast.
Ulster are already facing an uphill battle to that goal however. With Iain Henderson’s hip sidelining him until the international window, Robert Baloucoune’s hamstring torn off the bone, Sean Reidy set to sit out the Pro14 run and Will Addison’s back niggling away at him they will need to test their depth to make the most of their position approaching restart.
“Mathematically, we need two points,” McFarland said of their Pro14 semi-final bid during his virtual press conference yesterday.
“But that’s not the way we’re looking at it. We need to win this game and we’ll take it from there.
“If we’re in a position where we play Connacht, manage to get a win, which will be hard enough in and of itself, we’re obviously playing in a semi-final.
“If you win that, you’re playing in a final and then a (European) quarter-final. Those are your five games.
If we get to a position where we’re playing five games in a row, I tell you we’ll not have any issues going into the (European) quarter-final and we’re not going to have any issues going into a semi-final.
“We’ve got fresh bodies and hungry bodies here and we’ve got enough talent and depth within those games to make the adjustments we need as it comes along.
“If we manage to get what we need to get done against Connacht this weekend, we may be able to rotate the squad a little bit.”
Along with rotating through his playing options, McFarland hopes to see some evolution in his team’s playing style. An extra layer building on the performances that took them through the European pool phase.
“We’ve been on an aggressive plan in developing our game. We didn’t feel we were in a place where we were as good as we could get to, but we didn’t feel at all that we needed to change large parts of our game.
“On the defensive side, on the attacking side, with the ball, without the ball, set-piece – the coaches did a lot of work when we were away and they’ve come back with a lot of fresh ideas. Without turning the world around, they’ve added to their and our games.”
He adds:
“We don’t have a massive change in personnel, so the depth chart doesn’t change too much over the period of pre-season… everyone’s looking forward to seeing John Cooney and Billy Burns back playing together again, which is a great combination.
“We’ve got young James Hume, who was doing really well before and is somebody we’d be very excited about. And our back row was doing really well. Sean (Reidy) won’t be there, but you could pick any number of players in our back row and they’ll do a really good job for us.”
