After the Exeter game, Murphy had hinted at frustration about comparisons to other Ulster teams who had come up short in previous semi-finals.<\/p>\n
He went as far to say that “this team hasn’t been in a semi-final before”.<\/p>\n
And, in truth, he was right.<\/p>\n
Of the starting team pipped by the Stormers in a dramatic United Rugby Championship semi-final in 2022, only five were in action on Saturday.<\/p>\n
Along with Timoney, Ulster had Iain Henderson, Tom O’Toole, Stuart McCloskey and Ethan McIlroy as the survivors from the starting team that day.<\/p>\n
Even of the players on the bench that day in Cape Town, only Nathan Doak and Eric O’Sullivan featured against Exeter.<\/p>\n
“It’s such a different team since then,” Timoney said.<\/p>\n
“There’s been a lot of change now to the group, so it’s about this current journey.<\/p>\n
“Sometimes it’s good for individuals, and for me and the likes, to have those lessons built up over a number of years.<\/p>\n
“But the beauty sometimes of newer lads who don’t have those experiences, they don’t have those scars and it doesn’t even factor into their minds.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After the Exeter game, Murphy had hinted at frustration about comparisons to other Ulster teams who had come…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":648642,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85],"class_list":["post-648641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-rugby","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648641","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=648641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648641\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/648642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=648641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=648641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=648641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}