The timing of Connacht’s URC quarter-final clash with Ulster on Friday is ideal for Andy Friend, who rarely this season has enjoyed the luxury of having a fully fit squad available to pick from. So with 41 players training this week – only five missing with long term injuries – there will be no excuses.
The Connacht director of coaching has been there before. In his first season Connacht made the quarterfinals, losing 21-13 to Ulster at Kingspan Stadium, but right now, as he prepares to depart the club after five years, Friday’s game is the biggest.
“Big games and big moments, but we live in the present, and this is definitely a huge week,” he says. “I feel like we’ve had knock-out games for the last seven weeks, so we are pretty used to it. We know what the score is if we don’t win, so we are zoning in on our performance and what we can do to get the win.”
With only Gavin Thornbury, Shayne Bolton, Eoghan Masterson, Oisin McCormack, and Conor Fitzgerald sidelined, Friend believes having worked with teams in the knock-out stages before, it is usually the teams that are healthiest at the end of the season that prevail.
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“Confidence is high, we have been building and continued to build throughout the season. We are playing good rugby, but we are very aware Ulster are second in the table for a reason, and are hard to beat up there. In the last 70 plus years we have done it only a couple of occasions, so the odds are stacked against us.
“But it is not really what Ulster is going to bring, it is what we are going to bring, and knowing that we have to get our detail right, and when we do that we can beat any team.”
Having finished second in the table, Ulster have the “weight of expectation”, says Friend, while Connacht travel “with nothing to lose and everything to gain.”
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“Most importantly, the way our game has built during the course of the season, we have elements in both attack and defence that will cause them problems, but we have to make sure we deliver that. If we do that, we can cause them issues.”
Friend is all too aware of being humbled by Ulster in the past – including this season’s September fixture when Connacht lost 36-10, followed by a 20-22 loss at the Sportsground pre-Christmas, but neither match has been mentioned this week.
“We are very aware and respectful of the rugby they can play, and that they have beaten us twice this season. But I think we are a very different rugby team now. We have adjusted some things in our attack and defence, our scrum continues to be a weapon, our lineout attack and defence, and maul continue to grow, so we are a different team now to what we were then.”
So there’s no point talking about the past; it’s about this week and how Connacht turn up in Ravenhill, he says.
“It is more around what do we need to do and continue to sharpen within our game that is hopefully going to put them under pressure, and ideally put us on the right side of the ledger.”
