This time last year, it was not obvious what direction Ulster were heading as their season slipped away.<\/p>\n
But now, their destination is clear as Bilbao awaits.<\/p>\n
Saturday’s win over Exeter Chiefs in the Challenge Cup semi-finals moved Ulster to within one win of their first silverware in 20 years. <\/p>\n
Montpellier or Dragons will be the opposition, but for now Ulster can revel in a superb performance where they had too much for Exeter in a 29-12 win in Belfast.<\/p>\n
Heading into the game, Ulster’s semi-final record was poor. <\/p>\n
In fact, they had let leads slip as they missed out to the Stormers in the United Rugby Championship semi-final in 2022, and to Leicester Tigers the previous year in the Challenge Cup.<\/p>\n
After praising his players, Murphy was keen to point out that his young squad were not burdened by previous heartbreak.<\/p>\n
“I heard it all week, ‘Ulster are never good in semi-finals. They don’t win semi-finals’,” said Murphy, who added “one thing I would love is for people to be a bit more positive about things”.<\/p>\n
“Well, this Ulster team has never been in a semi-final before.”<\/p>\n
Murphy’s point rang true. From the loss in Cape Town to the Stormers, only five of that starting team – Tom O’Toole, Iain Henderson, Nick Timoney, Stuart McCloskey and Ethan McIlroy – featured against Exeter.<\/p>\n
In the space of four years Ulster have evolved, and this young group play without fear. <\/p>\n
“We’ve managed to win, which is fantastic, and we have a big task to go and try and win a final,” Murphy added.<\/p>\n
“When we get to that in three weeks’ time, we’ll be doing everything that we can to make sure that we’re at our very best over there.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This time last year, it was not obvious what direction Ulster were heading as their season slipped away.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":563419,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-563418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563418","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=563418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563418\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/563419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=563418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=563418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=563418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}