Nick Timoney no time for any Ulster consolation talk

After being kept scoreless the previous week in Sale, Ulster trailed Ronan O’Gara’s team 29-0 at the break.

Despite winning the second 40 minutes 29-7, for Timoney the bottom line was a third straight defeat for Ulster and he knows if the side can’t produce an 80-minute performance against Connacht in Galway tonight it won’t be a Merry Christmas around the Kingspan Stadium.

“I never want to be the kind of person who is taking huge consolation from coming back and getting close,” stated the Irish backrow. “It doesn’t matter whether it is wet, windy, close to Christmas...you can show you are properly focused, kind of says something about you as a person.

“I always think it is an important time of the year to show your team-mates what you are about, so I guess we’ll find out this week.

“Ultimately, we were pretty dominant in the second half against the champions of Europe and we were pretty dominant against the runners-up in Europe three weeks ago.

“In between all sorts went wrong and it felt like if it could go wrong it did but that stuff just doesn’t randomly happen by accident against good teams like that.

“It sort of shows we are not a million miles away if we can get things to click a bit more for us and it certainly felt like things were clicking for us in the second half against La Rochelle.”

Ulster have missed 49 tackles and conceded 31 penalties across their last two outings.

“The top teams apply pressure to you and that causes penalties, but also for some of us it’s frustration,” he said. ”When you feel like things aren’t going your way there is a tendency to maybe try and solve problems yourself.

"And that can lead to more penalties instead of actually trying to fix anything.

“There has been a bit of that and a bit of pressure, things can spiral.

"And it is important for us this week to trust the things we said we are going to do and not necessarily trying to solve things ourselves.

“There are loads of aspects to it but it is certainly not unfixable.”