Mexico vs the Chosen Province. 12 Professional Guinness Live

[thecrouch]

Bakebook fans making lapping up the mediocrity as usual. Drives me insane.

[bazzaj]

Two things article.
I disagree that we Let them dominate us up front.
I just dont believe we are good enough.
I think also the handling errors were caused by the rushing aggressive Leinster defence.
We started looking for the inevitable smash literally taking our eyes off the ball.
Amazing what pressure can do.

[promenader]

Congratulations to Leinster. They were easily the better side and deserved their win. A wee comment on some of their fans. A few weeks ago, some Leinster fans complained on their forum about the behaviour of Ulster supporters at Ravenhill. They didn't like our booing of the referee's decisions, our abuse of players, etc etc. I was sat in the North stand last night, over in the right hand corner amongst a crowd of Leinster supporters. The booing of the referees decision on Gilroy's first try was loud and sustained. From that point, the abuse directed at the referee was pretty nasty, culminating in one guy calling him a Welsh c**t. Other supporters we met and chatted with in the Horse Show bar were spot on. Just a reminder that when you get a crowd of 20,000 odds together, you're going to get a few morons there too, whether at the RDS or Ravenhill.

[Snipe Watson]

Gilroy was tremendous also...

Gilroy was caught too narrow for their opening score. His defence and rugby intelligence are still suspect in my book.

[Article]

Gilroy was tremendous also...

Gilroy was caught too narrow for their opening score. His defence and rugby intelligence are still suspect in my book.

wouldn't disagree his defence is one of the reasons he hasn't more caps...but second Leinster try a few stalwarts fell off tackles also...I was focussed on his attack and footwork which without we would have looked fairly blunt

[BaggyTrousers]

Numbers 1, 3, 4 & 5 clearly below the standard required at this level.

Bring back Paddy McAllister pronto!!!

That is an indisputable fact Big-al. The thing is we knew the front 5 was our problem before the game, we also know that we will be relying on most of them again next season.

Therein lies the issue, when push comes to shove we know our pack is not good enough. Whether Herbst, Treadwell, Tuohy , O'Connor and Coetzee can make it more competitive against good packs remains to be seen.

When away from home, when you go 13-0 down you are beaten 99.9 times out of 100. I feared they would subside to embarrassment but we need at least acknowledge that they stayed competitive. Meaningless I know, but they "won" the last 60 minutes and kept the Mexicans to containment mode rather than a celebratory thumping to the end. Cold comfort but a fair reflection I think.

I must say now that with all the bile I can muster, I hope the winner of today's semi wins the final. We were treated to the usual/not infrequent, braying Mexicans who knew very little but insisted that their silly little opinions be noted. Personally I hate the fu@kers, in terms of a "scale of gobshites", they are Ireland's Saracens.

[Nightsoil]

Baggy - Most of them will, but then a bunch of them will get injured, and then what?

We very badly need some academy players to become the real deal in the front and back row. And second row, come to think of it.

[Cockatrice]

Baggy we can do a pretty good impression of Sarries well apart from the 15 on the pitch.

[UlsterNo9]

Give me a golden generation of forwards over backs.

[Rooster]

Gilroy was tremendous also...

Gilroy was caught too narrow for their opening score. His defence and rugby intelligence are still suspect in my book.

He is ok with Cave at 13 as he shouts at Gilroy to get into position when left to think for himself though, well he just doesn't seem to think.

[scrum5]

Apologies if what I'm about to write has already been said......

Not good enough last night and not good enough all season. The 2 home defeats against Munster and Scarlets cost us a Top 2 finish and a home draw, then we might have had a chance.

Apart from Henderson and probably Rory our pack are soft. Though hopefully our new recruits can add some much needed grunt.

Not overly worried about McCall and Warwick per se as they have youth on their side, I worry that Clarke can bring the best out of them, in my opinion we need a specialist scrum coach. Maybe we can spend the 1m Euro on that side of the coaching ticket.

I'm tired of travelling down to the RDS and coming back thumped, I really do hate the place.

Some of the much maligned Leinster players on here, comprehensively outplayed their Northern counterparts and the rookie coach out thought his more experienced counterpart.

A word on the travelling support, brilliant as usual, now if only we had a team that could match it.

[scrum5]

PS we should be busting a gut, moving heaven and earth to bring Paddy McAllister back.
PPS Olding has to start or else make sure someone is on McCloskey's shoulder waiting the off load, the big lad has been turned into a one dimensional player in the space of 6 months.

[Marco]

At this stage nothing I will say hasn't already been said, but:

The best team won, no question!

Great atmosphere, but agree that a lot of unsavoury comments from the fans, not saying that Leinster are in any way worse, just a sad development of the game that I love

Saw Rory Best's interview this morning, with that sort of emotion he strikes me as a man that you would think anyone would follow out of the trenches and leave nothing behind, so why don't they!

I take this game far too seriously, need to get a life and chill, Summer is on the way!

[ruckover]

I think we badly missed Herbst and AOC. And I still maintain McCall needs a long run of games to get his scrummaging back to standard.

[Utownbean]

That was grim.

The most depressing thing about the loss was that Leinster didn't really have to do anything special to beat us. They simply had to take their scoring chances, make their tackles and wait for us to make a mistake. The forward exchanges were pretty even and aside from Johnny their backline was distinctly uninspiring (for a Leinster side).

I wouldn't go laying the blame at the feet of any indivdual Ulster player. It just seems that the team have a collective lack of self-belief and ability to operate effectively under pressure. Almost any time we got into a good scoring postion we stuffed it up either through a simple mistake like a handling error or, as demonstrated most clearly during that set of phases in the Leinster 22 after Hendo's big charge upfield, executing basics poorly and letting any semblance of structure fall to pieces.

We gave ourselves plenty of opportunites to score points and win the game (arguably many more than Leinster did). This is a credit to the ability of the current group of players but the team simply were not following through on all the good things they did and scoring points. We have so much potential at the minute but until we get execution under pressure sorted and the mental side of things mastered it ultimately won't come to fruition.