The Front Row Union Sport - Provincial Friendly: Connacht host Ulster for pre-season friendly

Provincial Friendly: Connacht host Ulster for pre-season friendly

Aug 15, 2015

—

We are currently carrying out a necessary behind-the-scenes upgrade to how images are stored and delivered on The Front Row Union Sports. With over 770,000 images on the site, we are moving our entire image library to a dedicated cloud storage service. This means images will load faster for you, regardless of where you are in the world, and the site will be more reliable overall.

As we are working on three separate versions of images during the offload process, the site cache sometimes struggles to keep up with which version to display and occasionally post grid images or complete galleries may fail to appear. This is a temporary side effect of the migration process — the image exists and is safe, it is simply in the process of being moved to its new home and identified as being there. A refresh of the page will usually bring them back, however, if it does not please contact john@thefrontrowunion.com stating clearly the post address and we will restore it as soon as possible. We apologise for any inconvenience this causes and appreciate your patience.

We expect the bulk of the image migration to be completed by the end of June 2026, with a fully upgraded version of the site ready to launch in August 2026. Once that work is done, the site will be noticeably faster, images will load more reliably, and you will not see any further disruption of this kind. Thank you for your continued support of The Front Row Union Sports.

It’s not often that I watch an Ulster side outscored nine tries to one and come away from the match reasonably satisfied with the proceedings, but that was the case last Sunday down in Athlone when Ulster Women played a series of trial matches against Connacht Women.

To set the scene, Connacht are a settled side, two years in the making, and they already had a run out against Munster Women under their belts this season. Ulster, on the other hand, are on the first phase of their rebuild with, unfortunately, quite a few key players missing due to other commitments last weekend.

The trials consisted of three thirty minute “games” and what Ulster were looking for was an improvement over each game. To be fair, improvement is exactly what they got, conceding five tries in the first run out (with two chances for Connacht butchered) but they improved dramatically in each session to concede only two in each of the second and third matches. In truth the final session could have went either way with Connacht scoring with the last play.

As far as Ulster are concerned there were a lot of boxes ticked.

Scrums improved dramatically throughout the games.
Line outs were solid.
First up defence was shambles during the first period but improved dramatically.
Pleasingly attitude and application were spot on from a very aggressive warm up through to the final whistle.

Unfortunately speed of delivery at the breakdown and re-alignment during open play still need work and that needs more competitive games.

So, plenty to be happy about but also plenty to work on. It’s a great pity that the Ulster Rugby haven’t arranged another pre-season fixture to give the players and coaching team a chance to address the issues before next Saturday’s Inter Provincial fixture against Leinster. Oh well. maybe next year!