With few friends in the corridors of power, Connacht need to start taking matters into their own hands, writes GERRY THORNLEY

AS LOW ebbs go, Friday night in the Sportsground was pretty grim. For the Connacht players, coaching staff, organisation and supporters, it was a demoralising night. Given where they are and where they’ve been for the last few years, attendances at the Sportsground have been a credit to their support base, but for many of the diehards in the crowd of 2,400-plus, the 30-6 defeat to Ulster was as dispiriting as any they could recall for years.

Connacht had gone into the game confidently and the crowd were expectant after the win over Cardiff the week before. By rights of course, Connacht should have no business beating the likes of the Blues. Purely in terms of budgets, they probably have no right to beat anybody in the Magners League; Ulster included. They should finish 10th and last every season which, alas, has been their lot for the last two campaigns.

But that doesn’t stop them dreaming, or, more to the point, believing – starting with the notion of finishing above one of the other Irish provinces and qualifying for the Heineken Cup for the first time. And realistically, Ulster are their nearest Irish targets. Perhaps, with all this in mind, they just wound themselves up too much before the game, leaving themselves flat when it actually got going – à la Leinster in the Heineken Cup semi-final against Munster in ’06.

How else to explain four missed tackles in the first four minutes? That shouldn’t happen in any game, at any level given any kind of level playing field, and certainly not at home in front of a relatively large crowd for one of the team’s biggest games of the season. In all the post-match autopsies, as relevant as any must be the need for Michael Bradley, Eric Elwood and Dan McFarland to ask themselves if they pressed the right buttons emotionally and mentally.

Once again their pack performed pretty credibly. Their lineout was excellent and actually got the better of Ulster’s; which itself had been superb a week before. Their defensive maul was superb, three times stopping the Ulster drive from establishing any momentum and even driving it back.

But, in both attack and defence, Connacht lost their shape horribly at times, and the 10-12-13 axis of Ian Humphreys, Paddy Wallace and Darren Cave were inestimably better at retaining or applying attacking shape either through phases or off turnovers.

It’s perhaps no coincidence that Humphreys and Cave had their best performances of a fledgling season on the night Wallace made his first start of the campaign. The way Wallace adapted to the turnover and switched the point of attack for Humphreys’ bonus point try before anyone else had realised the possibilities was testimony to his vision.

Connacht had no such visionary. As Donal Lenihan remarked on Setanta afterwards, Connacht need all their best players on the field all the time to compete, but over the course of a 24-game competitive season, that’s simply impossible. Hence the absence of Niva Ta’auso, who made or created seven line-breaks with his running and offloading against the Ospreys, was always liable to be significant.

Critics of Connacht’s very existence as a professional entity – and the forces of darkness are now likely to be whispering in the ear of the IRFU’s chief executive Philip Browne and treasurer Tom Grace again – point to Connacht signing the likes of Ta’auso rather than indigenous young talent from Munster and Leinster especially. But so long as it is not part of Irish rugby’s policy to direct young talent from the other provinces to Connacht, so it is they will never be fully utilised, as with the ACT Brumbies in Australia. And, in those circumstances, they’ve no option but to bring in the likes of Ta’auso, who is a very good signing.

Of course, performances and results like last Friday hardly help any prospective recruitment drive by Connacht, and in the Union’s corridors of power, Connacht have few friends. Hence the threat of extinction hangs over them permanently like the Sword of Damocles. All the powerbrokers emanate from the other three provinces and self-interest ensures Connacht are no more than drip-fed, so that by propping up the League table they ensure the other three provinces automatically qualify for the Heineken Cup. The other provinces don’t want a level playing field or true competition. For 15 years they’ve had their wish and the advent of a competition for their three A teams merely heightens the imbalance.

Nonetheless, the clear signs of a rejuvenation in Ulster’s fortunes may actually be a mixed blessing for Connacht, because that way the westerners might be perceived as less of a threat. In the meantime, of course, understandably impatient Connacht supporters are increasingly asking whether there shouldn’t be a clear-out at the top, given Bradley is in his seventh season at the province. Bradley and co are clearly under greater pressure than ever before, though Connacht’s problems go deeper than the appointment of one coach.

Yet, it is also invariably the case that it is in the times of greatest struggles when teams need their supporters to keep the faith. And Connacht will perform better, a good deal better, than they did last Friday, which actually was an unusually non-competitive home performance.

Besides, all sports, not just rugby, face the biggest struggles in Connacht. Signing the likes of Rocky Elsom or Jean de Villiers, on top of all the greater flow of indigenous young talent at Leinster and Munster, would account for at least one-fifth of Connacht’s entire playing budget. Amid a dearth of positive suggestions, the only one floating around is that perhaps Connacht should stop asking what the Union can do for them, and more what they can do for themselves.

The supporters dip into their pockets enough, but there are enough professional businesses, restaurants, bars, hotels etc in Galway – a cracking city if ever there was one – for the branch to ask if they want a professional team sport in Galway. In so doing, they could pro-actively seek outside financial support from them all, even if this only amounted to €250 or €300 each per annum.

But if a couple of thousand businessmen or companies rallied around the cause, Connacht could then make a couple of marquee signings, obtain a defensive coach or do whatever they feel they need to make themselves more competitive. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. But it can’t go on indefinitely like this.