Dan McFarland cites Ulster room for improvement

It proved to be Ulster’s toughest game so far in the PRO14 campaign yet McFarland’s team secured a fifth bonus point victory.

However, Scarlets missed four kicks at goal, gifted Ulster two tries from poor defensive mistakes and lock Kieran Treadwell - who scored Ulster’s vital fourth try - could have seen a red card for making contact with his shoulder to the head of Scarlets prop Javan Sebastian on 16 minutes, the sanction from Italian referee Andrea Piardi was 10 minutes in the sin bin.

“Obviously for anybody who measures stuff in outcomes, the result is excellent, a bonus point win against the Scarlets, who I think have conceded one of the lowest try counts in the league this year,” reasoned McFarland. “I said and we talked about it in the week, they’re a gritty team, they’ve played a lot of tight games this year, we always knew they were going to be tough.

“In terms of the result, a bonus point win is excellent.

“In terms of our performance, it’s definitely the worst performance we’ve had this year.

“It was a bit of a curious egg because we had some really top-class stuff, some of the stuff close to their line, our forward runners running hard and some of our mauling was pretty good but mainly the forward runners were excellent, obviously we got tries off the back of that.

“Our defence of their driving maul when we were down to 14 men was top-class at the start.

“When you flip it around, a little bit of smarts in the way that we played and controlled the game weren’t great against them.

“We conceded a maul try which is just not good enough, that’s something we’ll have to work at.

“Some of the individual performances were excellent - Mikey Lowry was superb again at full-back.

“Eric O’Sullivan at the top end of the team I thought was absolutely outstanding, and credit to him.”

With Ed Byrne’s late withdrawal from Ireland’s defeat at Twickenham, Finlay Bealham was forced to cover loose head from the bench. McFarland feels O’Sullivan would do himself justice if he’s called into the Ireland squad for Sunday’s game against Georgia in Dublin.

“If Eric is called upon, he’ll do a brilliant job, I don’t know what Andy’s thinking is or what the situation in the camp is but he’s got a lot of games under his belt at a high level,” said McFarland. “He gets through more work than the vast majority of looseheads that I know of, I don’t know of any that get through more.

“It’s not work in terms of tackle numbers or carry numbers, but it’s work of a type that you expect back-rowers to be good at, not props.

“His movement in the defensive line, his kick-chase, getting to rucks when players are isolated.

“There’s no questions with him of whether he wants to do it, whether he’s going to do it, whether he’s going to put the effort in, he just sprints.

“He’s got to scrum and maul as well remember.

“He’s a great person, a really, really good fella, he works so hard to do well.

“The interesting thing (against Scarlets) was how good his carrying was, he had a good carry and offload last week but this week we saw the hard-yard carries that I was really impressed with.”