Ulster are bracing themselves for an uncomfortable Friday evening courtesy of their opponents Edinburgh and what might be happening in the Scottish capital thanks to Storm Amy.
Edinburgh, smarting over their narrow loss at Zebre, will be gunning for Ulster, who they hammered last May on the last weekend of the regular season and may well have Lions tourists Duhan van der Merwe, Pierre Schoeman and the returning Darcy Graham – who scored a hat-trick in last May’s 47-17 shellacking – all involved this week from the off.
But the noises coming out of Ulster are that they are a much more resilient outfit than was the case in the previous faltering campaign, though the only evidence yet produced was last weekend’s six-try home victory over the Dragons and a meaningless win over Edinburgh in last month’s preseason friendly.
“[Edinburgh] got beaten away in Zebre so they’ll come back and they’ll have a lot to prove. Obviously, they need to try and get a win,” said Ulster head coach Richie Murphy.
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“We will adapt a game plan that suits playing against Edinburgh, which will be slightly different than the one we played against Dragons with.
“But we have a good plan in place, we believe in the plan and the players are happy.
“Not everything was perfect in training, but the attitude was right and the work ethic was there, so that gives me great confidence that we can go to Edinburgh and turn that result around from last year.”
“[Last weekend]We showed a bit of resilience when things went against us really early on,” said Murphy, alluding to Aaron Wainwright scoring a try for the Dragons just seconds after kick-off.
“So, a really positive game and plenty of things that we’ve picked out that we can get better at,” Murphy added, highlighting his side’s defence as an area to tighten up.
“Planning for Edinburgh, who are a big physical team, they like to go direct, run a hard at you with big ball carriers, so tackle quality is going to be hugely important this week.”
Murphy will make a few tweaks to his selection for their first away game of the season, with new signing Juarno Augustus thought likely to be given his first start after a cameo off the bench last weekend.
“We’re going away and we’ve set our team up slightly differently than we were last week in relation to the one or two positional changes,” said Murphy.
As for the appalling weather expected, he added: “We have plans that we can adjust in those conditions. It’ll just be a case of getting to Friday and assessing on the day and tweaking a couple of things here and there.”
Friday evening will provide much insight into whether Ulster are truly on an upslope.
