An astonishing couple of turnarounds in the finale to Pool C over the weekend culminated in the Ulster players returning to the Myreside pitch in Edinburgh yesterday for a glorious encore with their influential travelling support and exiled students. Incredible though it may have seemed, they had topped the group to earn a home European Cup quarterfinal with Toulouse on Friday December 11th.
Even the bookies might have given a blank cheque for that outcome on Saturday afternoon prior to the remarkable 100-point turnaround on their previous meetings which saw a predictably bad-tempered Toulouse lose to Ebbw Vale.
Suddenly, all three scenarios were open to Ulster come kick-off yesterday. Victory would earn an unlikely home quarter-final, while a draw would have led to an away quarter-final and a defeat by the Reivers would have seen them edged out of the last eight altogether.
For much of the first 50 minutes here it appeared the latter outcome was the likeliest. At that juncture a near rampant Reivers had just moved 18-6 ahead and a stoppage of over three minutes ended with Tony McWhirter being stretchered off. It seemed an apposite metaphor for Ulster's Euro hopes.
"To be honest I thought we were gone," admitted coach Harry Williams. "But there's great character in the side and it was a tremendous comeback. This is absolutely brilliant," he concluded, after seeing Ulster's season extended by five weeks.
More often than not led by McWhirter's outstanding replacement Derek Topping, the pack began chundering through and though there was more than a hint of catch-up about some of the scrambled passing across the pitch, at least they gave it a go and fortune deservedly favoured the brave over the two meetings.
After a Mark Blair try, the decisive intervention came by way of Sheldon Coulter's 69th minute intercept try, and all the while Simon Mason landed a perfect five from five attempts to lead the Euro scoring table with 97 points.
By comparison, that seemingly persistent thorn in Irish sides, Craig Chalmers, landed four out of eight, missing with a last kick, an 84th minute 50-metre penalty attempt which had briefly revived memories of Duncan Hodge's equalising drop goal in the 84th minute of the first game. For once then, the curse of the Scots had been lifted.
"Unbelievable," said an ecstatic Ulster captain David Humprheys. "This was beyond our wildest dreams at the start of the season.
"We came back from the dead. It looked like they might steal it again but to hold out and win was magnificent. At half-time our pack were dead and there was a feeling that a few guys hadn't performed. It was potentially our last 40 minutes of the season and a few harsh words were said. But we just said that we'd come out like we did in the second half against Toulouse into the wind and the pack produced a great performance.
"We scored a couple of good tries. Okay, one was a little lucky in that it was an intercept, but it showed that the four-up defence worked."
Even so, after a bright start which yielded a couple of Mason penalties, brave defence had rapidly become the summit of Ulster's ambitions for much of an otherwise one-sided first half. With Ed Morrison seemingly giving Ulster little, the Reivers were able to control the throw (Ulster had only three in that period) and had a much better line-out in any case.
The Reivers' restart game was flawless, helped by clever obstruction in front of the taker (there were also a couple of shirt tugs off the ball and one blatant case of offside on their own 22 which went unpunished).
With the Scots' peerless body positioning going into rucks, Ulster were thus starved off primary possession once Humphreys missed a penalty to touch from halfway and Darren Burns pilfered one of the three throws; instead they fed off ill-used scraps courtesy of turnovers from Andy Ward's strength in the tackle.
Long before Chalmers eventually drew the sides level, things were looking ominous for an increasingly quietened Ulster contingent as Allen Clarke departed and even more so on the halfhour.
It followed a by then predictable pattern. Another gobbled up Ulster restart, another Reivers penalty, another line-out, another rumble up the middle and then Alan Tait skipped Tony Stanger for flanker Iain Sinclair to run straight and put Stanger over on the loop.
Despite Ulster picking up their tempo after the interval, things looked grimmer still when a blindside back-row scrum move gave Edinburgh the space for Chalmers to float a long skip pass to Tait and he just got his pass away in time for Cameron Murray to score in the corner, Chalmers' touchline conversion making it 18-6.
Cue the comeback, which was instigated by a big charge from Longwell and Topping. Bell spoiled Bryan Redpath at the base of the scrum and generally started doing things at 100 miles an hour, and from one of his tap penalties, Topping, Jan Cunningham and incisively Humphreys probed a narrow corridor before off-loading for Blair to gallop over.
Another Chalmers penalty left Ulster two scores adrift but Mason responded in kind after good work by McKinty, Topping and van Rensburg. Enter Coulter with a big three minutes - first brilliantly nailing Murray into touch, then backpedalling to mark a Chalmers up-and-under, and finally gambling and reading Sinclair's over-disguised pass for Tait on halfway to race 60 metres to the posts for Mason's tap-over conversion.
Chalmers failed with first a drop-goal attempt and then his long-range penalty.
"It should be a sell-out," ventured Williams of the quarterfinal. Half-an-hour earlier, Ulster's season seemed stretcherbound, but now it had sprung vibrantly back to its feet.
Devastated Edinburgh coach Ian Rankin admitted his side had paid dearly for failing to convert pressure into points.
Dejected captain Bryan Redpath said: "At 18-6 we really should be looking to win the game. The reason for not doing that, I don't know."
But Redpath insisted that no blame would be attached to the otherwise impressive Iain Sinclair, whose pass was intercepted for Ulster's late score. "It is a 15-man game and it is the team that loses it, not individuals," he said.
Scoring sequence: 2 mins: Mason penalty, 0-3; 11 mins: Mason penalty, 0-6; 15 mins: Chalmers penalty, 3-6; 29 mins: Chalmers penalty, 6-6; 30 mins: Stanger try, 11-6; 46 mins: Murray try, Chalmers conversion, 18-6; 58 mins: Blair try, Mason conversion, 18-13; 61 mins: Chalmers penalty, 21-13; 66 mins: Mason penalty, 21-16; 69 mins: Coulter try, Mason conversion, 21-23.
EDINBURGH REIVERS: S Lang; T Stanger, J Mayer, G Shiel, C Murray; C Chalmers, B Redpath (capt); R McNulty, G McKelvey, B Stewart, D Burns, I Fullerton, C Mather, B Renwick, I Sinclair. Replacements: A Tait for Shiel (26 mins), S Brotherstone for McKelvey (35 mins).
ULSTER: S Mason; S Coulter, J Bell, C Van rensburg, J Cunningham; D Humphreys (capt), S Bell; J Fitzpatrick, A Clarke, R Irwin, G Longwell, M Blair, S McKinty, T McWhirter, A Ward. Replacements: R Weir for Clarke (23 mins), D Topping for McWhirter (51 mins). G Leslie for Irwin (56 mins)
Referee: E Morrison (England).
