Ulster centre James Hume says Richie Murphy’s side will use last season’s disappointment “as a bit of motivation” for the new campaign.<\/p>\n
Defeat by Montpellier in the European Challenge Cup final saw Ulster’s 20-year wait for a trophy roll on, while they were edged out of the United Rugby Championship [URC] play-offs and a place in this season’s Investec Champions Cup.<\/p>\n
Hume maintains the goal for this season is “silverware in any capacity” but feels they are in a “good sport” as they prepare for Friday’s final URC warm-up against the Ospreys at Affidea Stadium [19:45 BST] before the new campaign begins at home to Edinburgh on 25 September.<\/p>\n
“It was brought up at the start of pre-season how we don’t want that to happen again and we’ll use that as a bit of motivation,” the recently-turned 28-year-old told BBC Sport NI’s Nicola McCarthy when reflecting on how the last campaign ended.<\/p>\n
“It still hurts me a bit that we should have done so much better given the circumstances. It hurts as there could have been silverware, but you have to move on and it’s a new season.<\/p>\n
“We want Champions Cup for next year, which would be ideal so we want to concentrate on stacking up those wins in the league and moving on strong.<\/p>\n
“We’re in a good spot, so we just need to put it on the pitch and execute.”<\/p>\n
Becoming an “80-minute team” will be vital for Ulster to hit their targets with Hume accepting consistency was an issue last term.<\/p>\n
“We want to be fit enough to perform across those 80 minutes and not have any dips as momentum is a big thing in rugby,” he continued.<\/p>\n
“That’s something we didn’t quite get right last year in terms of our consistency.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ulster centre James Hume says Richie Murphy’s side will use last season’s disappointment “as a bit of motivation”…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":886287,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85],"class_list":["post-886286","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\/886286","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=886286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886286\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/886287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=886286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=886286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=886286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}