had initially been ruled out for three months<\/a> with an elbow injury picked up in Ireland’s successful Six Nations Triple Crown decider with Scotland in March.<\/p>\nHis return, a month sooner than originally planned, is a boost for head coach Richie Murphy as wing Jacob Stockdale has been ruled out of the final after he had surgery on a facial injury.<\/p>\n
Stockdale was injured in a tackle on Exeter Chiefs wing Immanuel Feyi-Waboso in the Challenge Cup semi-final, which was deemed to be high by match officials and he was sent to the sin bin.<\/p>\n
Back row David McCann has also returned to full training after he injured his knee late on against Exeter.<\/p>\n
As expected, Stuart McCloskey is out of the final with a hamstring injury picked up in the victory over the Chiefs in the last four and captain Iain Henderson is suspended. <\/p>\n
Experienced hooker Rob Herring will miss the decider after he was forced off early on against Glasgow Warriors on Friday on his return from a calf issue. <\/p>\n
Ulster, who have not won a trophy in 20 years, head into the final in Bilbao having missed out on the play-offs in the United Rugby Championship on a dramatic final weekend of the regular season. <\/p>\n
Murphy’s side need to win the final to qualify for the Champions Cup next season, otherwise they will have another campaign in Europe’s second tier. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ireland wing Robert Baloucoune is in contention to play for Ulster in Friday’s Challenge Cup final with Montpellier…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":679063,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85],"class_list":["post-679062","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\/679062","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=679062"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679062\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/679063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=679062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=679062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=679062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}