Ulster v La Rochelle - Saturday (Sunday?) Ravenhill (RDS?)

[Cap'n Grumpy]

What’s the craic with some away fans in the stadium?

Apparently it's the official travelling party so not the real fans who forked out their own money to get over.

Crowd of 150 (apparently) looked more like typical rugby fans than blazers. Quite young looking with flegs etc. Not wot you expect from the hangers on.

[jean valjean]

Doak for Burns ?

Once he played a bit more off the cuff he was certainly a step up. Ulster have missed having a 10 who can throw a fast skip pass to 13. With a fit and firing back 3 we need to get the ball wide quickly at times.

[MightyRearranger]

If you fell asleep at half time in the Leinster match and only woken up at half time in this one you'd think we were world beaters. Just a shame about everything in between.

Obviously have some slightly myopic glasses and beer fueled wisdom but felt Pearse was riding us, even at that though, a penalty and being matched ten at least once is shooting yourself in the foot.

[jean valjean]

What’s the craic with some away fans in the stadium?

Apparently it's the official travelling party so not the real fans who forked out their own money to get over.

Crowd of 150 (apparently) looked more like typical rugby fans than blazers. Quite young looking with flegs etc. Not wot you expect from the hangers on.

That's the spin JP and the eprc is putting on it.

[Dave]

That touch finder from Doak took some cojones.

[Dave]

Doak for Burns ?

Once he played a bit more off the cuff he was certainly a step up. Ulster have missed having a 10 who can throw a fast skip pass to 13. With a fit and firing back 3 we need to get the ball wide quickly at times.

Agreed. Billy is not a great passing 10.

[Dave]

What a player Tom Stewart is.

[Cap'n Grumpy]

That touch finder from Doak took some cojones.

There were a couple of kicks into the corner for 5m lineouts that he executed very well.

[rogni]

Team Charter or not - closed doors means closed doors surely?

[StandUp]

Doak>Burns

Ethel>Burns

[SUFTUM_19]

That’s a weird one to reflect on. We dug ourselves a massive hole in that first half so the fact we pulled that back to get 2 bonus points and put a bit of pride in the jersey is really encouraging - maybe we’re not back in the Les Kiss era after all, because 5/6 years ago would’ve rolled over and conceded 60+.

However, it’s also a bit disappointing cos as ridiculous as it sounds we actually could’ve won that if we had a few things go our way (some mentioned already - Henderson yellow, the lucky try in the second half, the bounce in the first, the McCloskey incident)

We were excellent in the second half and can take heart from that, but we cannot allow that to paint over the cracks in the first half - we were absolutely awful, like it was a genuinely brutal performance.

Thought the bench made a real impact, Doak was really good, some of his placekicking at the end was absolutely unbelievable. O’Sullivan, Treadwell and McCann also provided big impact, McCann had a fantastic steal as soon as he came on. We did miss Marcus Rea tho.

It’s been a bit of a crap 2/3 weeks, feels like everything was against us, but ultimately we didn’t roll over and we did fight back and that is some encouragement and hopefully we can take a bit of confidence from it going forward.

[Deraless]

Team Charter or not - closed doors means closed doors surely?

+1

You can also bet if this happened to any other team they'd be making a massive song and dance about it, UR seem as if they just roll over and get their belly tickled. They should be compensated. They provided a playable pitch.

[kingofthehill]

What a player Tom Stewart is.

He is soo good


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[UlsterNo9]

Have to take the positives from that 2nd half but.....

a plucky defeat and a great come back when the game was lost and the pressure off....

just glad that 2nd half happened, I don't know where we could have gone if La Rochelle had wiped us in the 2nd half also.

[Hawkeye]

A lot of the second half performance came from player creativity- playing what’s in front of them rather than sticking to a rigid game plan. Some of it didn’t come off but it set LR back and confused them. Too many teams are used to the “Ulster way”.