McLaughlin hoping to lead Ulster out of the wilderness

BRIAN McLAUGHLIN did his best yesterday to dance around the importance of this coming week for Ulster.

He rummaged through his vocabulary in a doomed attempt to disguise Saturday’s game in the cloak of just another routine fixture but it was all to no avail. After so long in the wings, Ulster are finally back on centre stage.

As everyone knows, the province has exited the Heineken Cup at the group stages on eleven successive occasions since they won the thing outright back in 1999. Now, finally, they find themselves primed to end that embarrassing streak.

Beat Biarritz in Ravenhill — and deny their opponents a losing bonus point — and the Ulstermen will go to Aironi’s Stadio Luigi Zaffanella in round six with top spot in pool four theirs to take.

Their destiny is firmly in their own hands.

“It’s a European Cup game and it’s a big game,” said McLaughlin. “There is no doubt about that. If we want to top our group we have to win it so from that point of view there is no doubt that it is a defining moment as far as Europe is concerned. From our point of view, we in the camp have kept our momentum the same as we would any other week. We have kept the same things.

“You can take these things too far and players can get ahead of themselves, get uptight and worried about it. We are trying to be nice and calm and relaxed, trying to do the same things that have been reasonably successful for us all season. Players like the routines that we are in at the minute so we didn’t see any reason to change that. It is a very important group game but that is exactly what it is, a group game.”

They face into it in rude health with Ruan Pienaar recovering from a rib injury to take his place in the squad and Andrew Trimble also being name-checked despite suffering a back spasm last week.

Back-row Robbie Diack misses out with a shoulder injury suffered in training while another notable absence is out-half Niall O’Connor who it was revealed last week will play his rugby in Connacht next season.

Not an unfavourable roll call, then, given this advanced stage of the season and the hefty holiday period just gone and McLaughlin will be thrilled to reach such a vital juncture with all of his big names present and correct.

Ulster have spent lavishly on prime South African beef including Pienaar, tight-head BJ Botha, lock Johann Muller and back row Pedrie Wannenburg and such investment was made with Europe in mind.

Ulster expects and all that, but McLaughlin’s adherence to the motto of ‘business of usual’ this week extends to the side’s approach to the mathematics — something which always muddies the Heineken waters come January.

Biarritz stand three points clear of Ulster and with the additional cushion of that four-try bonus point from when the sides met in round two. They cannot be afforded another but McLaughlin’s focus is win first, think about that second.

So, what of Biarritz?

The Top 14 outfit has been painted in some parts as an ordinary team, one that depends too much on their ‘petit general’ Dimitri Yachvili, talisman Imanol Harinordoquy and American wing Takudzwa Ngwenya.

McLaughlin would clearly beg to differ and talked up their effective maul and all-round ability at the set pieces as evidence of a more rounded threat even if he did pinpoint Yachvili as the one genie they must keep in the bottle.

Biarritz lie fourth in their domestic standings and warmed up for their trip to Belfast in impressive style last weekend by hitting relegation-haunted Agen with 34 points before the break and another 30 afterwards.

Ulster did something similar to Treviso in Ravenhill last Friday, but only in the first-half, and found it difficult to raise a similar gallop after the turnaround. That won’t worry them unduly but a similar script away to Biarritz three months ago may.

Ulster offered a similarly lopsided performance in the Basque country last October when, despite dominating the first-half, they took the tunnel at three points apiece and conceded four tries thereafter.

Ravenhill will offer a very different canvas in three days time, however, and it remains to be seen which Biarritz team shows up — that which beat Bath in The Rec or the outfit shocked by Aironi in Italy.

“There are two ways of looking at that,” said McLaughlin. “You could say that they have gone to Aironi and had their kick up the backside. Be under no illusion, they are looking to top the group and get a home quarter-final just like we are. You can’t read anything into that defeat. We are expecting them to come over here all guns blazing and we have got to put them away.”

It is in their hands.

Ulster squad (v Biarritz):

Forwards: T Court, D Fitzpatrick, J Cronin, B Young, BJ Botha, R Best, N Brady, A Kyriacou, T Barker, N McComb, D Tuohy, J Muller, TJ Anderson, C Henry, W Faloon, P Wannenburg, Stephen Ferris.

Backs: A D’Arcy, D McIlwaine, J Smith, M McCrea, A Trimble, S Danielli, P Wallace, N Spence, I Whitten, I Humphreys, P Marshall, R Pienaar.