RUGBY: Marcell Coetzee and Jared Payne in race to be fit for Ulster's European challenge

Payne suffered an injury during the British & Irish Lions Tour to New Zealand and has still to make his first appearance in the Ulster jersey.

South African backrow Coetzee made his only appearance of the season to date in the opening Guinness PRO14 match against Cheetahs, but has since been confined to the medical room.

Ulster will open their European Champions Cup at home on Friday, October 13 against English Premiership side, Wasps before going to France eight days later to face Top 14 side La Rochelle.

There had been speculation last week that both Payne and Coetzee could return to action for this Friday night’s PRO14 Irish derby against Connacht in Belfast.

But at Monday’s PRO14 club launch for the Champions Cup, Ulster director of rugby, Les Kiss, did not deliver overly positive news.

“We should find out about Jared tomorrow (Tuesday). It could be another week, but we will see.”

“Marcell will not be ready this week and we will get some strong information on him later this week from our specialist on where he will be.

“I reckon we will have the answer as to whether he will be available the following week (v Wasps) or other options from there at the end of the week,” said Kiss.

Ulster suffered a shock defeat to Zebre in Parma on Saturday, the 27-23 reverse ending their unbeaten run in the PRO14 and one which saw them slip two places in the Conference B standings, from first to third.

With Europe looming and in wake of losing to the Italians, it was probably not the ideal time to be asking Kiss if this could be the year Ulster would be contenders in Europe.

Kiss said: “I do not think we are thinking that this could be the year...to me this wasn’t the week (after the Zebre loss).

“Between missed tackles and turnovers we made 47 errors.

“You can’t afford to do that in any team, in any game.

“We’ve got to have our heads on and have our concentration up a little bit better so that we can be the team of this week rather than of the competition.

“That’s our focus, to try and be better each week and last week we weren’t better than the previous week and we paid the penalty,” said Kiss.

Elaborating on making so many mistakes, Kiss said: “I think it’s a collective of things.

“I think the guys’ attitude was fine, and maybe they tried too hard at times and forced elements of the game to try and break open Zebre.

“We came to a try decision that was disallowed late. From certain positions it wasn’t a penalty and should have been a try, but the game, if we managed it earlier, mightn’t have been that close.

“So we have to accept our medicine in that area but also it would be remiss not to mention what Zebre did, they played well, their linespeed was very good, they put out skills under pressure and we made these forced errors and unforced errors.

“So you have to recognise that Zebre played a pretty good style of rugby as well,” he added.

The Ulster director added: “We’ve put some building blocks in place where we’ve got a new structure in a lot of areas of our game, so we’re slowly putting that together.

“We’ve made some growth and some progress in the first four or five weeks.

“If you make as many mistakes as we did on the weekend you cannot build on anything over 80 minutes.”