Jared Payne pleased with attitude of young guns as Ulster ride high

Ulster have won their opening six games at the start of a season for the first time since 2012 with the likes of Michael Lowry, James Hume and Stewart Moore all featuring heavily.

The Belfast side have only conceded 10 tries so far in the campaign.

Payne said: “Defence is always the hardest thing for those young guys, you play the game to get the ball run around with it and attack, the guys are doing great.

“They have a bit to learn and they are learning but the strides they are making is awesome.

“When you get up to this level it is always tough because things happen a lot quicker and with the likes of James Hume and Stewart Moore out in those 13, if you make a mistake it gets picked up a lot quicker that you may not in a younger age group,” added the former Ireland centre.

“It’s tough on them but it is great to work with them, they are learning heaps and they are developing into pretty good defensive players.

“It has been a pleasure to work with them and they are going in the right direction.”

Payne - capped 20 times by Ireland and a British Lions tourist to his native New Zealand in 2017 - believes all players will make mistakes but it is how they bounce back that will determine the level they reach.

“You just give them (younger players) a few tools and let them go out and learn, I haven’t met any player that hasn’t made any mistakes in a game it is all part of it,” he said.

“As long as they are trying to learn from their mistakes and are really keen to get better, then all mistakes are a positive. If you learn from them you can’t go too hard at them.

“If the effort is not there, if the application isn’t there and the want to learn from your mistakes isn’t there then you have got a bit of an issue, but we don’t have that issue with any of our players and we are pretty lucky really.

“Even someone as good as Brian O’Driscoll was still making mistakes up to his last day of rugby so you are not never going to make mistakes, so you can’t go too hard at people if the effort and application is there.”

The Scarlets beat Connacht 20-14 last weekend in Galway and Payne is expecting a tough battle against the Welsh region.

“They are a good team and they worked pretty hard down in Connacht, they seem to be a pretty tight-knit group and there is a lot of enthusiasm amongst them and they are dangerous with some of the things they can do.

“They play for each other and they back each other up, they haven’t scored a lot of tries but they haven’t leaked a lot either.

“We are going to have to be on the money with the likes of Steff Evans and those boys coming over.”

A thousand fans will be allowed inside Kingspan Stadium for the game on Sunday, representing the biggest attendance inside the ground since rugby returned from the coronavirus-enforced break in August.

Six hundred spectators watched Ulster’s season opener against Benetton on October 2, but Ulster took the decision to play their next two home games behind closed doors, in line with advice from Northern Ireland’s chief medical and scientific officers.

However, following “extensive consultation” with the NI Executive, the Irish Rugby Football Union and Belfast City Council, Ulster put 500 pairs of tickets on sale for Sunday’s Pro14 encounter, which are only available to members of the #TogetherUlster scheme - a system specifically brought in to replace season tickets for the current season.

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