Mark Chisholm comes in for special praise from Anthony Foley

He came here to replace the irreplaceable and has done a great job for us.

That was the tribute from his coach, Anthony Foley, to Munster’s Australian second-row recruit Mark Chisholm. He started his Munster career a little slowly for many peoples’ liking and he’ll never be another Paul O’Connell! But Chisholm came good when it counted at Thomond Park, his last ditch line-out steal depriving Ulster of a great chance of a winning try.

“Mark has come in and done an excellent job”, said Foley. “He gets on with the job as well. He’s a seasoned professional. He plays an amount of games on the bounce, he’s durable and a good fella to have in the middle of the pack”.

Scrum-half Tomás O’Leary was voted man of the match and he, too, came in for a lot of praise from Foley.

“We gave him a couple of cameos off the bench to get Tomás into the season”, said Foley. “He had a couple of false starts but we’ve broken that cycle and got him out on the pitch. He’s an international, was picked for a Lions tour so he’s a player of quality. To have him there and controlling the game, it was one of those games when you needed stability around the base of a ruck, and it wasn’t easy to take him off there just before the finish”.

While Foley was unhappy about the awarding of Ulster’s first two tries, maintaining the TMO should have examined the way the ball may have been punched out of Francis Saili’s hands for the opener and whether there was a forward pass in the move leading up to the second, he also stressed his belief that the team is coming right at a crucial stage of the season.

Munster captain CJ Stander becomes eligible to play for Ireland from this week-end and he made no secret of his desire to wear the green jersey if at all possible. Coach Foley obviously believes he has the quality as he commented: “He leads from the front. He’s not a big speech man, more like an action man. He’s got what it takes, we know that from the three years he has had with us, he’s growing and maturing and turning into a fine player.”

“The crowd can’t have been disappointed”, declared Ulster coach Neil Doak. “I am proud of the way our guys played, especially at a venue as difficult as this. It was fiercely contested and I felt we were out of luck on a few occasions and, like Axel, we were unhappy with a few decisions that went against us. “