Ulster Rugby vs Harlequins

ROD NAWN

Yes, you might feel a little confused, back to Kingspan Stadium for a third consecutive weekend! TAKINGCAREOF ‘QUINS

Ulster come oœ a five-try thumping of the Scarlets in the PRO14 last week, plus consecutive European wins at Bath and at home to Clermont Auvergne. ‘Quins arrive from a nail-biting but important Premiership win at home to Gloucester, and that followed a win over Bath to stay very much interested in what will develop in Pool 3 in the next month. Home fans will pack Kingspan Stadium to the rafters this afternoon, for there is something about this competition which has a special place in Ulster hearts. It was 20 years ago that Europe’s most glittering prize was won for the first time by an Irish side. There have been many disappointments since, but qualification for the quarter-finals is no longer rare, it is in fact confidently anticipated. Certainly the squad which has been assembled in Belfast is one of the ‘deepest’ and most competitive for a decade, and names like Jacob Stockdale, Luke Marshall, John Cooney, Billy Burns, Marcell Coetzee, Jordi Murphy, captain Iain Henderson and many more are familiar to the Continent’s best clubs. McFarland is a demanding coach, and he does not set targets in terms of trophies but in the palpable improvement in the performance, skills and tactical innovation of his selected XVs. His squad is, it can be truly said this season, a harmonious one which has ‘bought into’ the Head Coach and his management team’s hardworking ethic and the realisation of ambition. Ulster is now a team which is a threat for every minute of the 80, there’s a resilience and a surefootedness and stamina which has given supporters reasons to believe.

To be clear, we’re packing the ground out again this Saturday afternoon for a Heineken Champions Cup date – and an important one – with the famous Harlequins. One of the English Premiership’s iconic clubs, and one emerging firmly from a form of relative torpor to challenge more convincingly on the domestic and international stage. While Ulster has a cerebral Head Coach in Dan McFarland. he has huge regard for the skills of his opposite number at The Stoop. Paul Gustard is widely regarded as one of the best defence and forward coaches of his generation, and England supremo Eddie Jones was very reluctant to lose his ‘out-of- the-box’ thinking in 2018 as this World Cup year beckoned. McFarland might oœer a wry smile at the tales of Gustard’s apparently more eccentric training methods: such, when at Saracens, bringing live wolves into the dressing room to emphasise the meaning, reality of ‘the pack’, hunting down opponents and trophies. Ulster’s Head Coach is actually just as innovative, the studious and ‘picky’ – one of his favourite post-match adjectives as he analyses even the best performance – allied to what John Cooney has described as an unique ‘personable’ concern for his players, as the best rugby footballers they can be and as people. Both teams meet on what appears to be on an upward curve in results and in performance, and each might justly claim to have ‘momentum’ going into the first leg of this unique back-to-back format in the pool stage of the Champions Cup.

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