We are Ulster!

The Archipelago

The only thing stranger than the unerring optimism of the Ulster fan after one victory is the despair that one poor performance (or rather, half of a poor performance) draws out of the woodwork. It’s the rugby equivalent of pouring soapy water on your gran’s front lawn because you want some worms to go fishing and the trouble is that just too many are willing to bite, myself included.

It’s a pity, really – one excellent performance will not turn Ulster into Heineken Cup contenders or make Ian Humphreys the next Dan Carter but the flipside is also true. One poor performance, even one so lacking in spirit, does not mean that the 22 players on the park are the worst ever to pull on that red hand and it certainly does not mean that any of those players doesn’t give a flying feck about the symbol that sits on their chest.

When you hear the stories of the squad singing in the changing rooms at Firhill last season, just how much it means to those players for Ulster to win becomes obvious. This game at Firhill was actually a poor Ulster performance and they escaped by the skin of their teeth with a win that was, probably, undeserved on the balance of play and yet the team celebrated it like there was no tomorrow. It is perfectly plausible that, when this Ulster team put in a performance like they did last night, they are equally as disappointed as they were jubilant in Glasgow last season. The trouble is that it’s difficult to hear or see disappointment through closed dressing room doors. 

To say that pulling on an Ulster jersey and taking to the field at Ravenhill means nothing to these players is absurd. Of the twenty-two players named in the squad last night, thirteen were born and raised in the province. These are thirteen players who will have grown up standing on the terrace at Ravenhill, in weather when a skiing suit would be more appropriate than an Ulster shirt, shouting and yelling, feeling every tackle, every fumbled ball, every try... To suggest that these players care less about Ulster than the fan on the terrace is absurd – not too long ago, many of those players were the fans on the terrace. 

It’s always disappointing to see this kind of reaction. Sickening, in some ways, that the immediate response to a poor performance is that X, Y or Z isn’t good enough to lace A, B or C’s boots, that the players cared more back in the day, that blah blah offers nothing to the cause… It’s a fallacy to suggest so. A grand piece of specious reasoning for those who know less about the sport than they let on to grab onto as a reason for a poor performance. 

The game has changed in the professional era, of course it has but that doesn’t mean that players care less, or are less dedicated to that red hand. Regardless of whatever they do in coffee shops on the Lisburn Road on a Saturday morning, when those players are on the pitch at Ravenhill on a Friday night, they are Ulstermen and they will feel the lows of a poor performance just as profoundly as they feel the highs of a win against Heineken Cup champions.

The current squad is littered with players who signed up for two or three more years at a time when Ulster Rugby was, literally, in melt down. At a time when it would have been easier to jump ship, and trust me when I say many could have, these players showed where their loyalties lay. Please don’t give me this crap about the players not caring about the shirt. 

The team is inconsistent. It sounds like an excuse trotted out now and again but this inconsistency is the price to pay for a young team. The fact that the inconsistency is becoming less frequent is at least a start but, regardless of where Ulster are playing, results like this will happen, especially when the team hasn’t played together and the selection is disrupted by injuries. Ulster was missing six front-line players last night. They started with David Pollock playing his first full provincial game in six months in the unfamiliar blindside role and, by the end of the first half, had had to rejig the whole backline. 

That’s not an excuse – we have to believe that Pollock can fill that six shirt and that the players who, otherwise wouldn’t have made the 22, are good enough to step into those shirts but strength in depth is still a problem at Ulster. A full-strength starting 22 can, on their day, compete with just about anyone, but the predominance of inexperienced youngsters filling out the rest of the squad means that injuries and losses in the international periods is a worry. 

Let’s make no bones about it – Ulster failed to take charge in the first half and lost out to the wind in the second. This second-half collapse is still all too frequent for Ulster. Of the games that Ulster have lost this season, they have been ahead, or in touch, at half time in all too many, only to fade away as the game has gone on. McLaughlin pointed to fitness at the start of this season but there are other factors – concentration chief amongst them. If the team can’t concentrate, consistently, for 80 minutes, then these problems are likely to continue, in the near future at least. 

There is still a long way for Ulster to go but the improvement this season has been tangible – I am no longer writing about points differences or losing bonus points. I can write about wins and bonus points instead. Winning half of the first eight games, given the fixture list, is no poor return, after all. 

At this stage last season, Ulster had 16 points; three wins, one winning bonus point and three losing bonus points. This season, the 19 points are made from four wins, two winning bonus points and one losing bonus point. More importantly, six of Ulster’s first eight fixtures last season were at Ravenhill, compared with only four this season. There is improvement there for all of those to see and one dismal performance against an average Glasgow side isn’t enough to say that Ulster have gone back to square one.

There will be steps forward and steps back. We should enjoy the steps forward without revelling too much or believing too much or asking for too much too soon; we should take the steps back as an inherent part of the development of this team, and not immediately dive into arguments about players not caring. Given the changes that Ulster Rugby has undergone and the nadirs that the team, squad and the club in general, have reached in that time, the fact that so many of these players put their signature where their mouths are shows the depth of feeling they have for Ulster Rugby and that red hand. Passion for the shirt is the one thing this team certainly does not lack.