Oct 13,2024
Ulster boss Richie Murphy praised his team's fight after they got the better of in-form Connacht in last night’s URC derby in Belfast.
The hosts, off the back of two losses in South Africa were up against a Connacht side, who had recorded two wins in a row, against Sharks and Scarlets.
But tries from John Andrew, Jude Postlethwaite, John Cooney, Dave McCann and Nick Timoney, helped them to a 32-27 win, with scores from Shayne Bolton, Joe Joyce, Ben Murphy and Dylan Tierney-Martin and seven points from the boot of Josh Ioane securing two bonus points for the visitors, who had Josh Murphy red-carded with 10 minutes to play.
"It's massive for us," Murphy told the BBC.
"Five points at home and just what we needed to get back into competition, which was made difficult by a good Connacht team.
"Our toughness and fight and commitment was really good.
"There are things we need to be way better at - like overplaying in our area and not looking after the ball well enough at those times which caused us a lot of trouble – in fairness to Connacht they capitalised on that - but we're delighted with the win
"To get a couple of maul tries is big for us, something that Ulster would have been built on back in the day, but we haven’t been able to capitalise on those in the past while.
"It was really nice to see the lads get over the line there. The last couple of weeks once we’ve got in and around that goal-line we haven’t been finishing off some of those tries but I thought we did really well today."
Player of the match Cooney (above), who also kicked seven points off the tee, told TG4: "We knew Connacht are going really well at the moment, we knew they were confident coming here.
"We hadn’t played particularly great so far and I think we’ve a lot more to improve on.
"We’ve just got to keep driving the standards, keep trying to win those moments.
"It’s a young squad and we’ve a lot to learn."
Ulster host the Ospreys next Friday night (7.35pm), while Connacht are at home to Leinster, who beat Munster yesterday at Croke Park, on Saturday (7.35pm).
