Ulster Rugby vs Leicester Tigers

CHANGING FORTUNES ALTERED AMBITIONS

by ROD NAWN

VISITS by Leicester to Belfast have provided Ulster Rugby fans with some of their most fervently memorable days – and there are reasons aplenty to believe this evening’s Champions Cup game could add further lustre to the archive.

Kingspan Stadium will be packed to the rafters – if such a modern arena has such things! – with supporters from both clubs seeking evidence for contrasting but equally important ambitions. Neil Doak and Richard Cockerill are in charge of sides brimming with international quality, and each has faced many challenging hurdles in this season of sudden changes in fortune. Both coaches have been confronted particularly by the sort of injury toll usually associated with unregulated bare-knuckled boxing, but to the immense credit of both they have accepted the loss of key players for protracted periods with the stoicism that comes with being soaked in the realities of a professional contact sport. Cockerill, unlikely though it might seem concerning someone who’s been such a constant at Welford Road, was just a few months ago the steward of a team struggling to make an impact in the Aviva Premiership, playing with a palpable lack of confidence and ruing a queue to the treatment room which meant young and inexperienced players were thrust into the fire earlier than would have been planned. The Leicester fans, if not exactly crying out for ‘scalps’, were unsettled as September and October offered very little of comfort in league, and not much more in the early European contests. The long-term absence of centre Manu Tuilagi was one of the most obvious and critical blows to a club used to being amongst the trophy- chasing elite, and Cockerill’s frustration was matched by that of England coach Stuart Lancaster who has clearly seen the Samoan- born three-quarter as the fulcrum of his World Cup backline. Ben and Tom Youngs were also ruled out for lengthy periods, and most sides would accept a scrum-half and hooker of genuine international quality might just be missed. Tom Croft and Geoff Parling, England players too, had long spells in ‘rehab’, and with Toby Flood exploring pastures new abroad the No.10 spot was being occupied by new faces to the Midland giants.

Cockerill maintained that things would improve, and they have, particularly in the last two months, but the management at Welford Road clearly went through some very intense soul-searching, and when Paul Burke left the coaching team some commentators wondered if there were more severe fissures in the structures. But as fans and players, coaches and owners, know – but oftimes forget –a few timely wins, the return of some important players, and a rediscovered confidence can swiftly erase any doubts and without a smidgeon of remorse all hail the club, the team, the staff in which belief had always been total and unswerving! Cockerill has been restored to unquestioned authority, the players are once more producing a brand of rugby Leicester traditionally plays: combative, inventive, physically formidable, instinctively positive. A club which has so easily accommodated the genius qualities of Les Cusworth, the flying Underwood brothers and – more recently – Geordan Murphy, is at ease with itself once more, and contending in domestic competition, as expected, and this evening hoping it is on the cusp of qualification for the knockout stages of the European Champions Cup. For Neil Doak’s Ulster the clouds of injury to key players still hover, dulled further by the astonishing toll picked up in Toulon last weekend when Louis Ludik, Stuart Olding and Paddy Jackson all picked up ‘knocks’ likely to keep them out of action for several weeks. They join the well-rehearsed contingent already sidelined. Doak, Jonny Bell and Allen Clarke would have hoped for a real challenge in Europe this season, but they have been undone to a great extent by things way beyond their control, and they’ve harnessed their resources in the squad as best they could. This evening the determination to win the game will be undimmed, and the team which takes to the Kingspan turf will rightly demand of itself a victory which would bolster the fine home record this year, and provide genuine evidence that the PRO12 can offer tangible reward.

ROD NAWN

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ULSTER RUGBY

www. ulster rugby.com