'Laboratory' tests do the trick for Ulster against Racing 92

It may be that necessity is the mother of invention, but Dan McFarland says Ulster had always planned to use their special op moves in the win over Racing 92.

The head coach hailed the 31-15 Investec Champions Cup win as the best of a patchy season so far but admitted that the lineout was far from perfect with five going astray early on.

However, such was their dominance over the Top14 leaders in the opening half, Ulster scored three tries, the first two coming off tap penalties.

The first and their fourth of the night, both scored by Nick Timoney, came via open-play mauls after tap penalties and looked unstoppable.

The second came via John Cooney tapping the ball directly to an on-rushing Timoney before Stuart McCloskey finished.

McFarland said that losing the early lineouts didn't factor into the decision to use the trick plays.

"We were planning to use those moves anyway," he told RTÉ Sport.

"It was just handy at the time that we didn’t have to kick to the corner.

"The lineout we found difficult, and we probably got our strategy a little bit wrong in the first five but fair play, Hendy [Iain Henderson] and Rob [Herring] and Al [O’Connor] worked it out, changed the tactics in there and managed to win them from then on.

"Obviously, you can’t practice that [Cooney to Timoney kick-pass] at full bore but it was timed perfectly, and we got the little bit of punch that we needed to be able to open up a little bit of space."

He added: "We were chatting at the start of the week about tap penalty moves close to the line. We've got a lot of guys who think a lot about stuff like that.

"It was Hendy who said 'why don't we do a maul off a tap penalty, we've got a really good maul', and I said 'yeah, let's go for it'.

"We apportioned a time at