Ulster back row David McCann believes victory over Benetton on Saturday would be ‘massive’ for the side heading into a crucial period of their season.
After a home defeat by Zebre last month, the province have fallen to ninth in the United Rugby Championship (URC) and have ground to make up over the final eight games of the season if they are to secure a place in the play-offs.
Benetton are two places below Richie Murphy’s men in the table, although the sides are level on 23 points.
“I think we have the potential to go there and get a result that can turn around our season and give us that momentum going into the next few weeks,” said McCann.
“It is massive for us. We’ve had a few weeks of training under our belt so it’s implementing all the things we’ve been working on and we should get the result if we do that accurately.”
Ulster have won just one of their past five league games and the loss to Zebre on 26 January was their first ever at home to the Italian side.
“We are definitely still using it as motivation for ways we have get better and not forgetting about that result on our home pitch,” added McCann.
“It is good for motivation, but we have definitely taken the learnings and moved on.
“We were compounding mistakes and I think we could sense we were doing that. We should have reacted better and identified that during the game, we tried to, but we had a lot of mistakes.
“With an inexperienced team, it is about taking those learnings and being concise about changing that.”
