Ulster’s 100% start to the GUINNESS PRO14 campaign continued this afternoon in Port Elizabeth as first senior tries in white and red for Marcell Coetzee, Angus Kernohan and Angus Curtis edged out a combative Isuzu Southern Kings side 28-7.
While head coach Dan McFarland will rue the missed opportunity of a try-scoring bonus point against a team that Ulster put seven touchdowns past in the corresponding fixture last term, there are multiple positives to be taken from the result, not least flanker Marcell Coetzee’s best performance in an Ulster shirt to date.
Encouragement will also be taken from the performances of young replacements Angus Kernohan and Angus Curtis, who both took their tries well, and that of David Shanahan who impressed at scrum half for 50 minutes once John Cooney, the province’s goal-kicking hero from the opening two rounds, had succumbed to a head injury.
Ulster lined up with one enforced change to the back-line, full-back Will Addison a late withdrawal due to illness, and Peter Nelson taking over. Elsewhere, Stuart McCloskey and Craig Gilroy, the man-of-the-match winners from the Scarlets and Edinburgh games respectively, started in the centre and out wide respectively, with winger Henry Speight, centre Darren Cave, out-half Billy Burns and the in-form Cooney – with 35 points under his belt already this season – completing the line.
Three changes up front brought in Tom O’Toole for Ross Kane at tighthead, Alan O’Connor at lock in place of Iain Henderson, who did not travel to South Africa, and Sean Reidy for Jordi Murphy, who picked up an ankle ligament injury on his debut last weekend. Front rowers Andrew Warwick and Rob Herring, lock Kieran Treadwell and back rowers Coetzee and Nick Timoney all retained their places.
Ulster enjoyed all the early possession, opting for the posts with the second of two penalties within the first four minutes as the Southern Kings laboured to keep them at bay by both hook and crook. Cooney added a second successful place-kick in the ninth minute.
Once the Kings had shown their offensive prowess on a brief but speedy foray into the Ulster half, a sixth penalty had Scottish referee Sam Grove-White warning captain Michael Willemse. Flanker Tiene Burger paid the price for his side’s persistent infringing with a trip to the sin bin on 20 minutes.
However, he was soon joined by O’Connor, who was shown a yellow card after TMO intervention for a no-arms entry into a ruck three metres from the try-line. The second row’s infringement also saw Cooney’s subsequent try chalked off.
The Kings’ discipline failed to improve despite Burger’s sin-binning, and Cooney soon added a third penalty just before another Kings breakaway again illustrated their threat on the counter, Burns and Treadwell just closing down Yaw Penxe as he chased Masixole Banda’s kick towards the whitewash.
A gash to the head for Cooney brought Shanahan into action eight minutes before half-time, and despite all of Ulster’s dominance – and the South Africans’ indiscipline – throughout the first half, it was the hosts who closed it out with a try of their own ruled out by the TMO – and the visitors with another player in the bin.
This time Herring was the recipient of the marching orders for collapsing a maul as the Kings pushed for the line in a drive which saw Burger stretch over, only for the score to be disallowed for the flanker taking up the ball when off his feet. Stern defence from Ulster and a fine turnover from Coetzee at the resulting penalty ensured the visitors ran off at half-time with a 9-0 advantage.
The Kings’ score eventually did come within three minutes of the restart, once again through a potent driving maul, this time finished legally by skipper Willemse and converted by Banda. Following a scrappy 10 minutes, Ulster finally settled back into their stride and scrummaged their way over the line at the third attempt, Coetzee finishing off his first try in Ulster colours.
Number 10 Burns proved an able deputy for Cooney as he dispatched the conversion for a 16-7 coreline, and was soon called on again when 19-year-old Academy back Kernohan, a recent entrant for Cave, gobbled up Shanahan’s neat pass from the back of a maul to dive over in the left corner.
This time Burns’ conversion attempt swung wide, but with a 14-point cushion and 15 minutes remaining, Ulster thoughts turned to the bonus point that a further two tries would bring. Reidy came close to grabbing the first on 71 minutes, bursting down the left flank from Shanahan’s offload, but he knocked on under a heavy cover tackle five metres out.
The next chance was too slow to come in terms of the province’s push for a bonus point. Curtis eventually touched down in the last move of the match after alert play at the breakdown from both Shanahan and McCloskey, the scrum half scooping the ball over his opponents’ reach to the centre, who palmed on for the 20-year-old to score.
Nelson’s successful conversion closed out the third round encounter at Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium, with the Ulstermen, who now hold a one-point lead over Leinster at the top of Conference B, travelling on to Bloemfontein for a match-up with the Toyota Cheetahs in five days’ time.
Reflecting on Ulster’s performance in Port Elizabeth, McFarland admitted: “We simply have to be more ruthless in what we are doing if we want to take advantage of the dominance we had in terms of possession, territory and line breaks in the first half. It is difficult when there are a lot of infringements in the game, but it is up to us to make our dominance count.
“That’s an area I have said before we have to improve at. I actually do believe we are improving and there was some better work done today. But when we came into the game we were fully aware that the Kings turn over a lot of ball at the breakdown. They turned over the second most in the league last year which probably a lot of people do not know. Only Cardiff were better than them at turning ball over at the breakdown.
“They put a lot of people into that and manage to slow the ball down. On our side, we need to be better in terms of our ball placement but also in our speed to contact. In the first half our attack was limited because the ball carrier was on his own on a couple of occasions, meaning we were slow to the clear out and it meant our ball got slowed down and John (Cooney) was not able to play at the tempo he wanted to.”
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