Ferris commits future to Ulster

IRELAND and Lions back row Stephen Ferris has targeted silverware with Ulster after pledging the next two years of his career to the province.

Ferris, 25, had been in the final year of his current deal at Ravenhill but signed a new two-year contract with Ulster Rugby on Friday to extend his association with the only team of his professional career until at least June 2013.

“It means everything,” Ferris said of his new deal. “This is home, I was born and raised here, Ulster is the team I’ve always followed and I have a huge desire to achieve something big with the club.

“I don’t want to leave Ulster without winning something.”

Ferris said competition for back-row places in the Ulster team had helped him play at the highest level, including his short-lived spell on the British and Irish Lions’ 2009 tour to South Africa, and he relished the ongoing battle.

“I’m competing against top quality players every single week for my place in the team, I’ve got to be training really hard and be absolutely on top of my game to ensure I’m selected, and that challenge keeps me hungry and makes sure that I am working to be the best player I can be.”

Ferris had signed a development contract with Ulster in 2005, making his debut that October and winning a full contract the following summer.

Promotion from the Irish Under-21s to the senior Ireland squad followed with an international Test debut against the Pacific Islands in November 2006 and Ferris was an ever-present in the 2009 Grand Slam-winning side.

Those Six Nations performances led to selection for that summer’s Lions squad in South Africa, where he played in two matches before a knee injury in training costs him his Test place and ended his involvement on the tour.

That Lions experience, though, will now stand to Ulster for a further two years with Ferris convinced success is imminent.

“Every season is a fresh start to an extent but this season is different. There is a definite sense that this is the start of something special. There’s a buzz around the squad and organisation as a whole, not just amongst players and staff but amongst supporters.

“Our young squad of players is growing up together and when you throw in the big names that have signed over the summer, I’m very optimistic that we will live up to our potential and excited that I’m going to be a part of it”

Ulster’s operations director David Humphreys hailed Ferris’s decision to re-sign as good for club and country.

“A huge amount has been written about our recruitment of overseas players over the past few months but the retention of Stephen for a further two years is an enormous boost for Ulster and Irish rugby,” Humphreys said.

“Ulster’s long-term success will be built upon Ulster-born players and despite interest from throughout Europe, Stephen’s decision to re-sign is a very clear indication that he believes we are moving in the right direction.”

Also on the front foot are Leinster, says skipper Shane Jennings, following a first win of the new campaign against Cardiff Blues on Saturday.

Jennings believes Leinster were becoming too used to that losing feeling after four defeats in their last six games before the summer break and a three-game losing streak in August and September. Beating Cardiff, then, at the RDS, came at just the right time to stop the rot ahead of this week’s trip to Italy to face Benetton Treviso.

“We’d lost a number of games,” said Jennings. “We’d lost the (Magners) Grand Final here, then we’d lost two pre-season games and then we lost to Glasgow so it was good to get that sorted.

“But it’s no good doing it just one week at home and then going away and not putting in a performance. We have to take the positives, like there was from Glasgow and the game against Cardiff, and build on them.”

Leinster gave a formidable performance at scrum time in Saturday’s win over Cardiff, but Jennings is expecting even tougher scrutiny of his pack’s credentials in Italy this Saturday.

“We put a lot of work into the scrum,” he said. “There’s a lot of hurt, not just in the front row, it’s the pack that have to take responsibility for what happened last season when things didn’t go as well as they should have.

“We have to learn our lessons from last year and we’ve to concentrate on that because we know our scrum are not world-beaters and we’ve to work hard on it, and the Cardiff match was a good step.”