Ulster's Mike Lowry unfazed by prospect of facing Bulls' World Cup winners in Pretoria
Mike Lowry isn’t worried if the Bulls bring back their South African World Cup winners for the United Rugby Championship clash in Pretoria on Saturday.
The Springboks were crowned Southern hemisphere champions last week after defeating Argentina with nine of Jake White’s Bulls involved in the squad.
Lowry could be up against double World Cup-winning full-back Willie Le Roux at Loftus Versfeld but the Ulsterman is more interested in righting the wrongs of last week’s defeat to the Lions.
“All we can really focus on is ourselves and if they bring in the South African internationals bring it on, and it is an even better challenge that what it might have been,” Lowry said.
“They are off the back of a good championship and will have a lot of confidence coming back in. Bringing those players back in will make a good difference to them but we need to focus on what we can get right this week, and we’ll not worry about who is playing or who is not playing until the team is out.
“To be honest we were pretty disappointed with a lot of things from the [Lions] game that really aren’t good enough in terms of fundamentals that we needed to get right and just didn’t.
“We just gave them too much access. We always know we have the players to create things and score nice tries but we probably slipped off too many tackles and that is an individual fundamental skill of rugby,” he added.
“The same with giving them just too many turnovers – we gave them way too much ball to be able to attack.”
On Saturday’s challenge, Lowry said: “The Bulls are great team, they got to the final last year. They will be hard to break down but we went through the plan of how we are going to go about doing that and hopefully we will be able to execute it, which is something we really didn’t execute last week.”
Usually for Ulster on a mini tour of South Africa both games are being played at altitude and Lowry admits the challenge is difficult to prepare for.
He said: “The last time I played in Johannesburg it was definitely the toughest with just how hot it was – that added another factor with the altitude.
“I don’t think it ever gets easy out here at altitude and it is something that you really can’t prepare for either.”