It feels like everything that could go against Ulster in the Champions Cup in the 2024/25 season has done, right down to the planes they’re flying on.
It’s tough enough taking on the Leicester Tigers at Welford Road without having five flights cancelled on you and having to split your travelling party across three planes.
Coaches Dan Soper and Niall Malone, as well as replacement Rory Telfer – who ended up playing the majority of the game due to Ethan McIlroy’s gutting injury – and the spare players didn’t arrive in Leicester until Saturday morning, via a flight to Birmingham that was redirected to the East Midlands due to heavy fog.
Add in the age profile of their backline, which ended the game with four players under 22 and a scrum-half at full-back, and it shows the hand that Richie Murphy has been dealt.
That’s not to say that Ulster would be competitive if all those things were going in their favour. The ceiling they have shown this season has not been good enough to compete with the likes of Toulouse, Bordeaux or, most recently, Leicester, and it was largely down to their own errors rather than the personnel that they were beaten at Welford Road.
Failing to do the basics by claiming three high balls led to the two tries directly after half-time that killed the game as a contest. Two unrecovered loose balls leaked the fifth. Missed passes gave Izaia Perese a walk-in for the sixth. All preventable.
And yet, despite all that, Ulster come away from Welford Road feeling like they are that one step closer to being back to a position where they can compete with some of Europe’s best, particularly after another first-half where they were genuinely in the contest against a physical Tigers pack, only falling behind when Josh Bassett scored the second of a hat-trick on the stroke of the break.
“We’ve had a couple of games where it felt like we were nowhere near it, to be honest. That Toulouse game, they were straight up the better team, and as much as you can be at ease with that, you’d rather feel like you’re competitive,” explains flanker Nick Timoney.
“It felt like we were competitive with that team, and maybe that’s a step in the right direction for us. As frustrating as it is self-inflicted, there are certainly things to take and run with and get better at.
“We’ll look at ourselves and try to get better. At least there’s some things to take because we showed, at least for parts, we could compete with them.
“When you look at the demographics of who we’ve been playing, there’s a lot of young guys with very few caps. I feel like a lot of them are coming into themselves a bit and are showing they can play in games like this and be a threat.
“We didn’t do that for 80 minutes, but there’s trends in the right direction. We saw that against Connacht a couple of weeks ago.
“We’re still a million miles off where we want to be, but at least if we can see we’re going in the right direction, it gives us something to keep going with.”
Timoney was the man who kicked things off in what was the perfect start for the province as, after Nathan Doak had kicked them into the lead from the tee, the flanker stole in and capitalised on a mix-up between Handré Pollard and Ollie Hassell-Collins to canter over for a try that left the home fans baying in derision.
But unfortunately for the province, that was as good as it ever got for them. Bassett had the Tigers ahead at half-time with the first two tries of his treble, and Ulster’s inability to hold onto the ball after the restart allowed Hassell-Collins’ double to pull the hosts into an unassailable lead, Bassett’s third try and Perese’s score rounding off the scoring.
“I thought we started pretty well, actually, or certainly we felt like we were in the game,” adds Timoney.
“It felt like we should have gone in at half-time ahead, it didn’t feel like we were out of our depth by any means.
“But second-half, mistakes, giving the ball away too easily, got reefed too many times and gave away turnover penalties.
“If you give them field position and that many opportunities, they’re too good a team not to make us pay.
“It feels a good bit self-inflicted rather than they came out better in the second-half. It was a lot of our mistakes.”
Despite all that, Ulster still have plenty to play for in their final pool game against the Exeter Chiefs on Friday night. They do still have a razor-thin chance of making the Champions Cup knock-outs but, at worst, victory at Ravenhill will assure them of a place in the Challenge Cup last-16 in April.
The bigger challenge, though, is picking themselves back off the canvas and going again after another hefty loss.
“You’ve got to show you’re not fazed,” explains Timoney.
“I’m long enough in the arm to have experienced worse losses than this and better days than this.
“Ultimately, the consistent thing about all of them is you have to go away and get better and try to keep the pedal down and keep going.”
“It’s not a crisis, though it’s not great, you just have to get better. If I and the lads my age can make sure we’re not pointing the finger at anyone else other than ourselves and just trying to get better, if we cultivate that culture and take responsibility, then we’ll be in a good place.”