Ulster to capitalise on return of players

Yesterday's new two-year central contract with the IRFU for Andrew Trimble suggests fortunes have somewhat changed for the Ulster winger. With Tommy Bowe, Keith Earls and Luke Fitzgerald among the injury list, Trimble is again kept in the national fold, as Ulster face into a critical series of RaboDirect matches, followed by their Heineken Cup quarter-final next month against Saracens in Twickenham.

Coach Mark Anscombe, whose team dominated the early part of the PRO12 campaign from the head of the table, have found the last few months hard going and have fallen to second place and level on points with Glasgow. However, more positively, Johan Muller, Jared Payne and Nick Williams, have returned from injury, which gives the province more a profile of the team they were before Christmas, dominating the competition.

Williams, particularly, was a serial man-of-the-match winner. Whatever Anscombe has done to the Kiwi, who played less than 20 times when he was with Munster for two seasons, he has shown an entirely different side to his playing ability.

“Yeah there’s a tendency . . . you might say you could be tempted to panic a little bit,” said Trimble about Ulster’s fall from PRO12 dominance. “We are not in the position we wanted to be. We wanted to be top of the league with as many points as possible between us and the second-placed side.

"But we can take a lot of encouragement from the fact we've had all these injuries and that we were performing well . . . the guys coming back are a huge boost. I don't know anything about the lineout but Johan is one of the best and Nick, before he was injured, had been playing outstandingly well for us. There's a lot of experience in the three of them."

Litmus test
Friday's match against Edinburgh in Murrayfield is a litmus test for the reconstituted side. Also back are Paddy Jackson and Paul Marshall, who both played last weekend against Italy, while Iain Henderson and Luke Marshall have suffered injuries and miss the game. Henderson has a foot problem and is being assessed with Luke Marshall, who sustained concussion against Italy for the second week in succession, being monitored over the next seven days.

"Delighted actually," said 28-year-old Trimble on signing up for two more seasons. The record first-team try scorer (50 tries), who was out of favour with Declan Kidney for this year's Six Nations Championship, has been at Ulster for almost eight years and will remain in Ravenhill until at least the summer of 2015.

“In the last couple of years playing for Ulster I have really enjoyed it. I definitely have got a couple more seasons of performing well and I’m confident I can do that.”

Over the next few weeks Ulster will need to find a consistent and higher level of play if they are to meet Saracens with hopes of a Heineken Cup semi-final on April 6th. But as Trimble pointed out, they have done the unexpected before.

“The big games, the must-win games that are tough like Castres away, that was a difficult fixture,” he said.

“We didn’t play that well. It was a bit ugly but it took the best out of us and we got a win. We had never won a competitive game in France so I think that showed something. It showed when we’re up against it we can produce even if it’s just grinding a result. We’ve done it in the past.” And no doubt will have to do it again.