Munster head coach Clayton McMillan felt his side were “poor” in their United Rugby Championship loss against Ulster on Friday night but said his side will “bounce back” from a poor run.<\/p>\n
After making a strong start to the campaign, Munster have struggled over recent weeks and have now lost four of their past six including back-to-back Irish derbies against Leinster and Ulster.<\/p>\n
Against the latter at Affidea Stadium, Richie Murphy’s side had only a narrow 6-3 lead at half-time before tries from Tom Stewart, Jake Flannery and Bryn Ward after the restart secured a comfortable 28-3 win for the hosts.<\/p>\n
The result put an end to Munster’s three-game winning run against Ulster and saw the northern province jump above their Irish rivals in the table. <\/p>\n
“We trained well during the week and expected a much better performance across the board,” McMillan told BBC Sport NI.<\/p>\n
“We didn’t get it, and we weren’t allowed to get it through a quality, physical Ulster side, so full credit to them.<\/p>\n
“They [Ulster] won the scraps on the ground and were able to build a little bit of momentum off that, the breakdown was poor, we lost races and we carried high. We had a couple of good moments but, overall, were poor again.”<\/p>\n
The defeat dropped Munster to sixth in the URC table before they turn their attention to the Champions Cup and Sunday’s game against Top 14 side Toulon (13:00 GMT).<\/p>\n
McMillan added he needs to “find out what will bring a turn of form” before their trip to the Stade Mayol.<\/p>\n
“It is just our execution, which is becoming a recurring theme so, first and foremost, the coaches will look at ourselves before we look at the players,” said the head coach in his first season at Thomond Park. <\/p>\n
“We need to reflect again and start thinking about what will bring a turn of form. We are hanging in there, but we haven’t been that compelling with anything that we have done.<\/p>\n
“We have a good group and we will bounce back, but you would like to have a bit more consistency and not have to go through performances like that to get a response.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Munster head coach Clayton McMillan felt his side were “poor” in their United Rugby Championship loss against Ulster…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":391359,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-391358","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-rugby","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-rugby","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=391358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391358\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/391359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=391358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=391358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=391358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}