As the wind and the rain whistled around the Affidea Stadium, Ulster set the tone early against Ronan O’Gara’s La Rochelle through Zac Ward’s early score. <\/p>\n
Tom O’Toole and Cormac Izuchukwu, as well as nine points from the boot of Nathan Doak, put Ulster in control, and the only real blot on the first-half copybook was Judicael Cancoriet’s try with the clock in the red. <\/p>\n
But any time an under-strength La Rochelle side threatened a fightback in the second half, the men in white rallied with a response of their own as brothers Zac and Bryn Ward crossed, and James McCormick scored late on to add a cherry on top.<\/p>\n
“I thought to score six tries was really good,” Murphy said.<\/p>\n
“I thought we played some really good rugby at times, but those conditions were really tough.” <\/p>\n
La Rochelle were missing a number of key players through injury or with a focus on the Top 14, like Will Skelton, Gregory Alldritt and Antoine Hastoy, but as two-time Champions Cup winners they could not be discounted. <\/p>\n
As Hume said, the La Rochelle badge speaks for itself.<\/p>\n
“It was obviously a big occasion. We recognised that during the week and then when you get here and you see them with the La Rochelle badge, you know this is a massive game.”<\/p>\n
“It was a huge opportunity for this club with the direction we want to go, to move into the latter stages of competitions.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As the wind and the rain whistled around the Affidea Stadium, Ulster set the tone early against Ronan…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":524979,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[5903,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-524978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-rugby","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=524978"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524978\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/524979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=524978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=524978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=524978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}