Stuart Lancaster hailed his side's defence after Connacht made it four wins in a row in the BKT United Rugby Championship last night.
The province won their first Interpro since January 2024 as they handed Ulster their first home defeat of the season for a 26-19 victory at Affidea Stadium.
While Connacht scored four tries to secure their bonus-point win, three of which came in the final 27 minutes, Lancaster took particular delight from his side’s attitude without the ball, particularly as they held Ulster scoreless during the 10-minute period where Finlay Bealham was in the sin-bin.
"Huge satisfaction, to get a win at Ulster is unbelievably hard," the Connacht head coach told RTÉ Sport.
"Delighted with the win. Delighted with the lads. I thought we defended really well. And overall, I thought we deserved it."
Defence had been Lancaster's top priority when he took over as head coach this summer, and while the province endured some early season struggles, the former Leinster senior coach (below) believes they are turning a corner heading into the final third of the campaign.
"I thought all the replacements made a big effort, but ultimately, what probably prevailed in the end was the quality of our defence and our workrate off the ball to defend well, to get off the line and make it very hard for Ulster to break us.
"I thought we looked like we really enjoyed defending and defending well.
"I think that's the biggest change that I've noticed in the Connacht lads now. If you go back to the Glasgow game [in February], when we went 10-3 down.
"When I first arrived, there was this sort of deja vu look in everyone's face, like, 'here we go again, we know how the script runs’.
"It's been trying to break that psychological mindset. That Glasgow game was a big one for us to do that, obviously, against a top-of-the-table team.
"Now, to do it away from home should give us a lot of belief."
While Ulster didn’t score during the 10-minute period of Bealham’s sin-bin, they did squander one certain try in the moments before Connacht were restored to 15 players, when Ben Carson spilled an easy pass just metres from the line on 47 minutes, which would have put Ulster ahead for the first time.
And although Ulster coach Richie Murphy (below) admits it had a big swing on the contest, he believes Connacht were deserving of their bonus-point win.
"You know, tonight we weren't good enough at home," he said.
"It's probably the first time this year where we've been put under that amount of pressure; the breakdown, the physical contests Connacht won. So, when in an Interpro, if that's the case, it's always very difficult to get back.
"There was a lot of mistakes in that first half on both teams, and no one could really get a flow.
"We talked about moving quicker [at half time], we talked about the fact that we felt like we weren't winning the collisions.
"We reacted reasonably well after that and, I suppose, ended up dropping the ball very close to the line, which was a big moment in the game.
"No one does that on purpose, so you've got to take that on the chin and move on.
"Defensively, we were a little bit off. We couldn't quite move fast enough to get ourselves set and couldn't slow the ball down enough. When that happens, it obviously becomes very difficult."
After a brilliant start to the season, Ulster have now lost two of their last three games, with their squad depth stretched by both a growing injury list and the Six Nations.
The losing bonus-point does at least lift them up to second in the table, although they could fall out of the top four depending on the rest of the weekend’s games.
And the Ulster coach is keen to get their first home defeat of the season flushed out of the system ahead of a trip to Italy next week to face Zebre.
He said: "It's really important that we go there and prepare really well because we lost to them last year here. So, it's really important that we go back over there and try and get some points.
"Obviously, we're in the top three tonight. We'll probably drop back down out of that, but we're right in the mix and if you had said at the start of the season, would we be in this position? We probably would have taken it.
"It's really important now that we roll our sleeves up and get stuck into these next few games in order to put us in a really good position for the end of the season."
