Richie Murphy: Ulster have a free shot against Leinster

Ulster completed the double over their neighbours to the south this season but on both occasions Leo Cullen rotated his team. He’s likely to field something close to his strongest side at the Aviva Stadium this Saturday as they look to bounce back from their Champions Cup final defeat to Toulouse.

With the Bulls heavy favourites to beat Benetton in their quarter-final, the prize on offer in Ballsbridge is likely to be a trip to the South African highveld, but Murphy isn’t worrying about that.

“Free shot, you know what I mean?” he said of the task at hand.

“It’s notoriously hard to win qualifying games when you go away from home. We’re not going that far, to the Aviva, we’ll go into it with confidence.

“But we’re playing a really good side who are hurting so we need to put them under pressure.

“That will be part of the plan to apply as much pressure as possible on Leinster because, realistically, I don’t think anyone will give us a shot down there.

“Our ambition is to go and beat Leinster, that’s the game that’s coming next. We’ll deal week to week, the only game we’re preparing for is Leinster and if we run out of games we run out of games.

“If we start thinking about winning the whole thing that will distract us from what we need to do and what we need to do now is prepare to play Leinster and that’s going to be a very tough task.”

Ulster’s defeat to Munster on Saturday means that Leinster claimed the Irish Shield for topping the interpro table, but Ulster’s promising flanker Dave McCann – who was part of an excellent back-row performance along with Cormac Izuchukwu and Nick Timoney, says the squad believe they can pull something off this week.

“Well, we’ve played them away a lot and we’ve beaten them a couple of times and lost a couple of times. We know what it takes,” he said.

“We know if you’re going down there and you’re not 100 per cent there’s no chance, they’ll show you the door. I think we know what we need to do.

“Definitely, all good teams in knockouts raise their game, playing better opposition raises their game. It’s just natural that you rise to the occasion.

“But you have to have the building blocks in your training to allow you to rise to the occasion and win the moment.”

They’ll hope to have Stuart McCloskey and Ethan McIlroy back after they withdrew with groin and back issues, while starting locks Kieran Treadwell and captain Alan O’Connor are doubts after coming off in the first half against Munster with calf and head injuries.

Saturday was their first defeat in five, but McCann can feel belief growing under Murphy.

“Definitely, just how quickly we’ve been able to advance in our process,” he said.

“That we’re definitely competitive and we should be taken seriously in the play-offs is credit to Richie and the team who have got behind the messages, all the other coaches who have really gotten in behind it in the last two months.

“It’s really accelerated our process, but it is still a process. We’re going in with confidence, but we’ll see how we go.”