James Hume will come back from season-ending knee injury stronger than ever, says Ulster coach Dan Soper

The 25-year-old was withdrawn in the early stages of their win over Cardiff last month with a “significant” knee injury that will require surgery, the general recovery period of which is around nine months.

“He’s gutted. No-one wants to be out and we’ve had enough guys go through it that you see the battle they go through,” said Soper.

“James is fully aware of that. He’s in good spirits. He’s still about the place getting ready for surgery, making sure he shows up as healthy as possible for that so that the recovery goes as well as it can on the other side.”

Soper continued: “He’s pretty philosophical about it. It’s part of the job, the risk of injury. He’s a determined young man so no doubt he’ll see it as an opportunity to get better at other things when he gets back.”

In the short-term, Ulster have been in the business end of the season for a while, but now they are really into the crunch period of the URC as they sit seventh with three games remaining, although the standings are so tight that six points cover the Stormers in fifth and the Lions in 11th.

While the goal of reaching the Play-Offs has always been clear — the top-eight make it into the knockouts — the race for a place in next season’s Champions Cup has become even more murky after the Sharks made the Challenge Cup Final.

Were the South Africans to defeat Gloucester in two weeks’ time, then they would take one of the URC’s eight spots, meaning only the top-seven would qualify for Europe’s top tier next season and, with inter-provincial clashes against Leinster and Munster to follow Saturday’s trip to the Scarlets, it’s not exactly an easy path for Ulster to achieve that.

Still, Soper is confident they are trending in the right direction after their win over Benetton, though he knows choppy waters could still lie ahead.

“It’s been a curvy road we’ve been on, hasn’t it?” he grimaces.

“Throughout the season we’ve had some days we’ve been very disappointed with, and our supporters have been very disappointed with as well. But we’ve had a lot of things in our game that has been good. It’s about improving those and bringing up the things that haven’t been so good.

“Have we turned a corner? I don’t know. Our thing is to try and improve every day. Richie (Murphy) has set up a few new ways of training, we’ve had some tweaks there, so that’s been a bit of adapting for everyone, but we’ve seen an improvement in how we train and a lot of the stats on the attack side of the ball are trending the right way.

“Have we turned a corner? There’s a few more turns to come, I’d suggest.”

What the coaching staff will hope is that having a full week of training to work with will help things. While the Benetton performance was better, Ulster are still very much rough around the edges, but Soper is optimistic that being able to take the time to drill down into the detail of what Murphy is trying to instil will have led to improvements for the visit to Llanelli.

“A lot of it is refining and there’ll never be a question of effort. It’s more clarity of some of the things we want to do,” explains the assistant coach.

“Having the training week means there’s some detail we can work on that we expect to transfer into the next match because that’s the standard we want to see at training.

“We want to see an improvement, definitely from the coaching team, but I think if you asked any of the players they would want to see that as well.

“It’s such a cliche but one game at a time and that’s where we’re at at the moment. We haven’t been good enough to put ourselves in two competitions at this time of the year, so we’re only fighting on one front which is different to Leinster, where they’re having to juggle things at the minute.

“How prepared are we? Hopefully people can see the performances over the last few weeks have been improving.