Ulster fall flat on restart but little lost in defeat
No crowd. Nothing at stake. The spiel was that rugby would scoot from zero to 60 once Project Restart kicked into gear in Ireland but there was the unmistakable bang of pre-season friendly off this one on an eerily quiet Lansdowne Road.
Edinburgh's defeat of Glasgow on Saturday had punched Ulster's ticket for the Guinness PRO14 semis. Connacht were embarking on what amounts to a competitive training bloc this next few weekends before they can reboot with a new season further down the line.
It was a limbo that manifested itself in the cordiality shared by the players in the pre-match warm-up and a below-par display from an Ulster side that had its fire quenched by events long before they took the road south from Belfast.
“I felt we looked like a team that had been watching the Glasgow result on the sofa last night, which is really disappointing because I thought that might happen,” said Ulster head coach Dan McFarland. "Two weeks ago I thought to myself that I'd actually like it a lot if Glasgow won because it would have given us a really meaningful game.
"But I also feel there's a test in games like that as well where, if you watched Leinster come out [Saturday] night... I hate blowing smoke up their arse, but they still produced an intensity that was there. I suppose they had an unbeaten record to defend as well, so there is that.
“The bottom line is that there was an intensity in that and I just felt we were a fair bit short of what we can achieve and put out on the pitch. The lads are aware of that. It's not the end of the world but it would have been nice to produce something closer to what we're capable of.”
As a game, it did have some things going for it, not least six tries.
Ulster did at least use the occasion to give new boys Ian Madigan and Alby Mathewson a good chunk of time off the bench in the second half and Bundee Aki marked his 100th appearance for Connacht with a score and a bundle of crunching tackles. While Connacht's first two tries were delicious little gems.
The second went to scrum-half Kieran Marmion who ran on to a dainty little grubber from Porch after a nice Wootton offload. Both were converted and in the bank by the 23rd minute. Ulster's offerings by then amounted to a pair of John Cooney penalties.
Down 14-6 the break, Ulster should have been only barely adrift. That they weren't was down to a bad error from hooker Adam McBurney who somehow failed to ground the ball off the back of a rolling maul just before the break.
A try from Jacob Stockdale nine minutes after the restart did drag them closer to parity but Connacht's ability to strike with less in the way of leg work was reinforced when Tom Farrell dropped the ball going over the opposite try line soon after.
Opportunity lost? Not a bit of it. Within minutes Aki was barrelling through defenders like he had through attackers for much of the first-half to dot down under the posts. A fitting reward for the man who first walked into the Sportsground in 2014.
Carty's extra two made it 21-13.
Ulster had already made half-a-dozen replacements at this stage but they had enough in the way of rhythm and harmony about them to claim a second converted try through flanker Nick Timoney shortly after Connacht lost prop Jonny Murphy to a yellow card.
Andy Friends's side had another eight minutes to hold on with 14 men at that point and 20 in total to the final whistle. A tall order but it was one they managed with some solid defence and a discipline that had evaded them at other times through the evening.
A single point to the good with time almost up, Carty could have made that four when presented with a kickable penalty, but Connacht went all in with a kick to touch and their reward was a fourth try, this one claimed by Jack Aungier on his debut.
J Porch; P Sullivan, T Farrell, B Aki, A Wootton; J Carty, K Marmion; D Buckley, D Heffernan, F Bealham; U Dillane, G Thornbury; E Masterson, J Butler, P Boyle.
N Murray for Thornbury (43); J Aungier for Bealham (57); J Murphy for Heffernan (58); J Duggan for Buckley (73); T Daly for Farrell (74).
J Stockdale; C Gilroy, J Hume, S McCloskey, L Ludik; B Burns, J Cooney; J McGrath, A McBurney, M Moore; A O'Connor, K Treadwell; N Timoney, J Murphy, M Coetzee.
S Carter for O'Connor (32); T O'Toole for Moore, E O'Sullivan for McGrath and A Mathewson for Cooney (all HT); M Rea for Coetzee (46); I Madigan for Burns (52); J Andrew for McBurney (57); M Lowry for Hume (HIA, 73).
F Murphy (IRFU).
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