John Cooney doesn’t mask his emotions in the way most players do, so though he was clearly stoked at the win, there was also frustration at its closeness and letting Connacht claim two bonus points.
“The big moments, we’ve just to keep winning them, and I kept screaming throughout the game, ‘Let’s go and win the next one’, because it never really works out as you plan,” Cooney said after scoring 12 of Ulster’s total from a try – his first against his former team – as well as two conversions and a crucial late penalty.
“I’ve learnt it the hard way. You make mistakes, you try and react and implement something better and try and chase the game, so I think it’s a steep learning curve for some young fellas (in this team).
“You might drop the ball in training and you end up 40 metres back and it doesn’t really matter, but in a game, it can be the difference between winning and losing, and I’ve been on the other side of that a lot of times.”
He continued the theme: “Maybe I’m too honest, but I found it frustrating out there as an older player.
“We’ve got to learn; we need to learn quicker. This is a tough League, and if we’re going to finish top eight, I think we need to realise, as they (younger players) will, that mistakes in big games can matter really bad.
“I think I’ve played for so long that I forget what I was like at that stage,” he said of when he was still fairly fresh to the nuances of the pro game.
“(But) the best way to learn is through difficulty and bad games.
“It’s a cliché, and I hate it too, but we do have to learn.”
For all that, he still recognised that Saturday evening’s result could be seismic for Ulster’s 2024/25 season.
“It was good to get five points,” said the 34-year-old.
“It was one of those you forget after as you’re just happy to get the win, and then you remember it’s five points, so it was big, and we were chasing that.
“For us to come out that side and get five is huge.
“It was especially huge as it was at home, and though I think we made life difficult for ourselves for a good bit of the game, we kept responding and scored a couple of good tries. It’s always good to get a win.”
Addressing the conditions and the impact they had on the game-plan, Cooney explained: “It was one of those, swirling winds and tough conditions, so a lot of what we’d planned went out the window when you stepped on the field.
“It wasn’t meant to be raining, it was raining; it wasn’t meant to be that windy, it was windy, so it was going to what was working for us, and the aerial battle was working well for us, so you kind of doubled down on that. When you get a hammer, you keep using it.”
And as for his 71st-minute clutch kick to nudge Ulster into a three-point lead, there was no real debate on the tee coming out.
“‘Let’s go for the posts, we need to go ahead,” is how he described the call.
“After that, it was really just try and flip the field and close out the game, we scored (through Nick Timoney), knocked it on, and they get a kick to get a bonus point, so again, we’re up by eight (32-24) and we can’t really be giving away cheap points like that.”
He’ll not spare anyone in this regard.