Richie Murphy apologised to Ulster’s supporters for his side’s abysmal performance as they fell to a shocking 15-14 defeat to Zebre at a stunned Ravenhill. “A massive thank you (to the supporters for coming out) and I’m sorry that our performance didn’t match their enthusiasm for the team,” said Murphy after his team had failed to overhaul a 15-0 second half deficit. The defeat is Ulster’s ninth loss in 14 games in all competitions this season and means that their URC play-off hopes have shipped what could be a massively damaging blow.
We are working really hard and sometimes they (the supporters) might look and say: ‘what is going on?’ but there is a huge amount of time and effort from everybody, and we have to find a way to be more consistent in our performance. “The poor performances keep coming and we need to find out why and do something with that,” he added. “This is hurting,” admitted the Ulster coach.
“It’s very disappointing and we’ll have to move on now… it puts a dint in our season.
“Fair play to Zebre they deserved their win.”
Looking at the narrative of the game, Ulster never led and ended up chasing too much distance on the scoreboard against a determined Italian opposition who made light of their underdog status as well as the challenging weather conditions.
“Put yourself in those positions (trailing 15-0) and ultimately, you’re going to fall short.
“I’m massively disappointed and when these things happen you look at the week and how we prepared, did we do due diligence, and have we prepared the boys right?
“We run into a break now and it’s never nice after a loss.
The Italians deserved their triumph which was a first on visits to Belfast and was a humbling experience for their hosts who had been expected to win and likely claim a bonus point.
“Bitterly disappointed,” added Murphy, “a poor performance from us all the way through the park I suppose we have to look at the week leading into it.
“We turned up feeling we were in a really good place ready to go, early in the game we talked about trying to apply pressure through field position but didn’t do that well enough.
“We need to find out why we were so far off at the start of the game, and I suppose emotionally we were ready for the challenge that was coming at us, we felt that we were but when you see how we played we were well short of where we needed to be.
“We started off and our scrum was under pressure, a couple of breakdowns too and we needed to move the ball and get into our flow.
“We had talked about trying to pin Zebre back in their 22 but we didn’t do that.
“When you have a performance like that it was like Cardiff all over again maybe that’s something, last game in the block,” said the coach alluding to last October’s 21-19 defeat in the Welsh capital.
Ulster are now ninth and still outside the play-off zone after this result and because of the Six Nations break do not play again when they travel to Benetton on February 15.
“It’s a knock to the confidence,” said Murphy of what this might do to Ulster’s URC season going forward, “we’d looked at this next batch of games as an opportunity to squeeze up the table.
“The players are downstairs and disappointed with themselves but ultimately, we’re all in this together and we have to find a way to become a more consistent team, even falling off tackles but we were also lateral in attack.
“No-one was going at the line and we look a long way off the team that we should be.”
Ulster’s next match is a friendly with Queensland Reds next week before they travel to Benetton for the return to league action later next month.
“Our next league game is Benetton away so all the concentration will be about trying to prepare the team for that.”
A late missed penalty from Nathan Doak proved costly for Ulster’s hopes of overhauling Zebre but Murphy pointed out that the errors were there long before that moment.
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