Ulster wait on injured duo
by Mark Doyle, 13 October 2008
Stephen Ferris and Clinton Schifcofske are both injury doubts for Ulster ahead of Saturday’s Heineken Cup clash with Halequins.
Back row Ferris injured his ribs during last weekend’s 26-10 defeat by Stade Francais at Ravenhill and is now awaiting the results of an x-ray to ascertain the full extent of the damage.
Schifcofske, meanwhile, was forced off just four minutes into the second half of the game in Belfast with a knee injury.
"We will allow the players 48 hours to recover," Ulster boss Matt Williams explained. "Their injuries will be assessed then."
Meanwhile, Williams is remaining upbeat on the province’s European hopes, even though he freely admits that they were outclassed by Stade.
“When you are a coach you can only ask your players to give everything and when I walked into that changing room at full-time there was blood on most jerseys, there were dislocated fingers, there were collision injuries and you saw that they were still going up to the last minute,” the Australian revealed.
“But we also have to say we played an incredible side. The drop-goals were incredible and you just have to take your hat off and say that is incredible skill. We were 16-0 down and we had hardly made a mistake.
“We kept fighting and fighting and had great spells of pressure just before and just after half-time but we didn’t come away with any points and you can’t afford to do that against a great side like Stade. They took their chances and we didn’t.”
And Ulster skipper Rory Best still believes that they can qualify for the knockout stages.
“Obviously it is going to be difficult. You need to win your home games and we haven’t done that,” the Ireland hooker mused.
”But we still have five more games to go and we will be going into Harlequins with a bit of confidence on the back of our last 10 minutes against Stade.”