Ulster keen to ensure that involvement in European competition is still on the agenda: Nick Timoney

Ulster’s 38-10 reversal at Welford Road against the Leicester Tigers was their third consecutive defeat in the tournament but Richie Murphy’s side still have a slim, if unrealistic, chance of reaching the last 16 of the Champions Cup.

Ulster go into the final weekend of group games sitting fifth in Pool 1 with no points from their three games and need a bonus point win over Exeter, hope the Sharks get no match points away at leaders Bordeaux and have a 56-point swing in their favour.

Avoiding defeat against the English Premiership side, who have also lost all three European games, would see Ulster drop into the Challenge Cup for a second consecutive season.

“There is a Challenge Cup place on the line for getting a win anyway, it is not as if we are throwing the dice and hoping some miracle happens,” said Timoney.

“There is something there for us to play for as well as the fact that we are back home and there is pride on the line playing in front of our home fans and getting a bit of momentum.

“It should be an easy one to get motivated for. If we are in a position where whatever the mathematical possibility of us qualifying is there, then we can go after it but either way we are still going after that Challenge Cup place.

“We want to be in as many competitions as we can and compete the best we can, Exeter is a huge game.”

Timoney was disappointed that Ulster failed to build on their promising start at Welford Road as his own converted try helped the side to a 10-0 lead after nine minutes but failed to score for the rest of the game.

He explained: “We started pretty well, we felt we were in the game if not had the upper hand and felt that we probably should have gone in at half time still ahead, and then conceded in the last play of the first half.

“It certainly didn’t feel that we were out of our depth by any means.

“Second half it was mistakes upon mistakes, giving the ball away too easily, a couple of breakdown penalties and dropped balls. If you give them that much field position and that many opportunities, they are a good enough team to make us pay and they did.

“It largely feels a good bit self-inflicted as much as they certainly came out better in the second half, it was probably a lot of our mistakes.”

Despite the result, conceding six tries and not scoring for 71 minutes, Timoney felt there was enough in the game for Ulster to feel optimistic about going forward.

“We have had a couple of games to be honest where we have felt we were nowhere near it. The Toulouse game I felt straight up they were the better team and you can sort of be at ease with that,” he explained.

“I felt we were good enough to be competitive with Leicester and maybe that is a bit of a trend in the right direction for us.

“As much as it is frustrating that it was self-inflicted, there are certainly things that we can take and we need to keep finding things that we can take and run with and get better at.

“We’ll look at ourselves and try and get better, at least there are some things to take because we showed for parts we were good enough to compete with them.”