Matt O’Connor accepted that Leinster’s Pro12 campaign and with it their season is all but over after this latest defeat. “It’s going to be very hard from here. We’ve got two games to go and you’d like to thank you could potentially get maximum points out of those and give yourself a fighting chance, but we need to use next week as an opportunity to look at our game and make sure that we’re up for the fight for our last two games.”

Having earned home semi-finals in each of the previous five seasons since the play-offs were introduced, to reach five finals and win the last two, O’Connor also accepted that this had been a poor campaign.

“It’s been very disappointing. There’s no question in relation in to how disappointed we are down in the changing room. We made it hard for ourselves. We lost games throughout the course of the league that we shouldn’t have lost and the reality of that is that we put pressure on ourselves. Once the margins become really narrow you’ve got to be really good.”

O'Connor said that the sin-binning of Rob Kearney was the decisive moment. "They're a good side. Not many teams come up here and win, and Ulster wore us down. They knew that they would have the advantage off the back of what we'd been through over the last little period. They made that pay in the last 15 minutes of the game."

In saying that “meritocracy has made the league more competitive and we haven’t mirrored thar rise in intensity”, O’Connor further conceded: “We can’t be at 80 or 90% at winning the league. There are loads of individual things and collective things that we can be better at.”