Ulster: Dan McFarland bemoans lack of intensity in Munster defeat

Ulster head coach Dan McFarland says his side lacked intensity in both defence and attack as they fell to a damaging 17-24 home defeat by Munster.

The loss saw Ulster drop to fourth in the league table having lost their last three games in the competition.

They have two regular season matches remaining, with a top four finish required for a home quarter-final.

"They were better than us in most facets of the game other than the maul and the scrum," McFarland conceded.

"I thought they defended really well, worked really hard and I thought their attack was pretty good.

"I don't think we defended very well and I don't think we attacked very well so we were looking for ways to score and mainly that was through gaining penalties, getting into the corner and driving them over."

• Munster punish lacklustre Ulster

Ulster were 15 points behind after 44 minutes having scored only three points in the opening half, but fought back with tries from Rob Herring and Sean Reidy.

However their response was not enough to overturn the deficit and they must realistically now win both their remaining fixtures against Edinburgh and the Sharks while relying on other results to go in their favour if they are to claim a top-two finish.

The province sat one point behind leaders Leinster after beating their inter-provincial rivals in March but have not won in the competition since, while their European campaign was ended in a two-legged defeat by Toulouse.

"We haven't been scoring tries in the opposition 22 at a high enough rate for a number of weeks now, so that's been certainly an area that we need to improve in," McFarland said.

"We're doing a pretty good job in terms of stopping the opposition from getting into our 22 but all the games that we've lost this year we've been ineffective in the opposition 22.

Ulster have won just one of their last five matches

"It's no longer in our control to finish in the top two. We've got to go out and win the last two games and hope that other teams slip up," McFarland said.

"Obviously we're desperately keen to finish in the top four but it means winning the games. I always thought that to finish in the top two we'd have to win out and we haven't done that now."

The Munster defeat came just six days after Ulster were beaten at home by Toulouse, which saw the French side advance to the Champions Cup quarter-finals courtesy of a one-point aggregate win.

McFarland said he could not be sure that the agonising nature of the European loss had played a factor in his side's lacklustre showing against their rivals on Friday.

"All I can look at is the actions on the pitch. I don't think we were as intense in our play as Munster were," he said.

"I felt that there wasn't the intensity running onto the ball that we needed in attack that would have created the quick ball that we needed to be able to get the ball to the edges to find the space that Munster sometimes leave.

"I didn't feel that in defence we had the intensity or the speed of movement to be able to fill the field to get the tackles to slow down their ball."