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Ulster head coach Dan McFarland said his side looked like they “didn’t care” in the first half of Sunday’s last-gasp defeat by Munster.
McFarland was left annoyed by handling errors and a lack of clinical edge.
“I know it’s not true, but that’s what it looked like,” he said after saying Ulster were careless “in the real sense of the word, as if we didn’t care”.
The defeat is the latest in a difficult run of results for Ulster and, speaking to ViaPlay, McFarland added: “We were terrible. I think that’s as poor as we’ve been in a long time.”
Ulster held a 22-3 lead over 14-man Leinster in December before their Irish rivals hit 35 points without reply to win, and that defeat was followed by a 39-0 hammering by Sale and La Rochelle’s win over McFarland’s men in Dublin – a game that was overshadowed by a pitch controversy.
The three-game winless run was ended by victory over Connacht in the final game before Christmas, but McFarland’s men only escaped with the four points after Jack Carty missed a conversion with the final kick of the match as Ulster came away 22-20 winners in Galway.
However, there was no avoiding a late collapse on New Year’s Day as Healy converted his own score in the final play as Ulster threw away a 14-5 lead with seven minutes to play.
“It should never have come down to the last kick of the game there,” McFarland said.
“I think there were 11 times we were in their 22 and lost the ball on 10 occasions. We scored a really good try on the one occasion when we hung on to the ball.
“How many times were they in our 22? Less than the fingers on one hand and we repelled them on one occasion and they scored on the other.
“They were magnificent at holding on to the ball. Fair play to them because they didn’t get many opportunities.”
When asked if Ulster were suffering from a dip in confidence after a difficult run of form, McFarland said his side have to “look at the whole way we are approaching the game”.
“Maybe that is in training, we are not as focused in training at making sure the fundamental parts of the game are right.
“Little chip kicks in the first half when we are running out of our own territory, dropping or losing the ball in contact, which are things the opposition we played today just didn’t do.
“We deserved to lose because although we created a lot of pressure we weren’t good enough to exploit that and they were good enough to exploit the small bits that they had.”
