THE WORST THING you can do after a tough loss is to dwell on it. Going home, letting the demons lurk in the back of your mind and running over every little ‘what if’ that could have seen the result go another way.

Billy Burns didn’t have the opportunity to do that following Ulster’s loss to Leinster at the RDS Arena last weekend. Whenever he came home, he had two-and-a-half-year old daughter Ada to keep him occupied instead.

“Before her, I’d go home and after a loss I’d be alone with my missus and all I could think about would be the loss. Now that I have someone to take my mind off it, you can sort of park it a little bit,” he smiles.

That’s not to downplay what was a fairly significant blow to the Ulster psyche down in Dublin a week ago, where they couldn’t close out a 19-point lead with Leinster down to 14 men. Conceding 35 unanswered points on their way to taking a point from a game where it looked like five was almost a certainty was a hammer blow.

The aftermath was ‘a lot of honest conversations’, according to Burns, ones which Ulster haven’t had to have for a while. There was a lot of poring over game tape, questioning each other on where they could get better, where things went wrong. Players had to front up and admit they weren’t at the races.

“We had two days and it was terrible. All you think of is what you could have done better, how much of an opportunity it was for us to get points down there,” grimaces Burns.

Ben Brady / INPHO Ben Brady / INPHO / INPHO

“But you can’t rest on it too much. Coming in (on Tuesday) from half past seven to 12 o’clock, it was all about finding answers, trying to find solutions. It’s not all rosy and happy, you have to have the hard conversations. But as soon as that’s done, if you’re dragging that around being miserable it’ll seep into your performance this week.

“We’re lucky that we get to close that book, take our learnings and go into a huge game this weekend in a competition that this club loves, that this group of players love, and we’ll get our teeth into it.”

In many ways, the best way to move on is to do just that. While you can never truly consign a performance to the history books, Ulster will try and do that as best they can when they head to the AJ Bell Stadium tomorrow for their opening Heineken Champions Cup tie against Sale Sharks.

For Burns, as a member of the leadership group and as the de facto commander of the back line as fly-half, the burden is shouldered largely by him this week and ensuring he’s driving the standards. It’s not a new role, but it’s one he finds has to be accompanied by example.

“You’re half-backs, if you want a team to buy into what you’re trying to do, you need to be a leader,” he points out.

“I’m not just saying it, but we’ve plenty of leaders who will pipe up. I’ve a lot of experience over the years in a different league and in different games. In the backs, we’ve a lot of youngsters, but I don’t really see 22/23 as young, they’ve been playing since they were 17.

“The main thing is, you can only be a leader if you get your own stuff right first. I can’t expect good performances all the time from other people if my house isn’t in order.

“I need to make sure I get my own stuff right, which I feel like I have been doing a lot of the time. Hopefully if I can help young guys out, guiding them if I can, but a lot of them guide me to be honest, they don’t need guiding.”

Burns hadn’t played Champions Cup rugby until he joined Ulster, but he concedes that it didn’t take him long to realise just how special a competition it is once he started playing in it regularly, and since then he’s had his fair share of ups and downs with the province.

Last season was perhaps the lowest moment, Ulster knocked out in the last-16 at home by Toulouse in the dying stages thanks to some individual brilliance from Antoine Dupont when they had already done the hard part by winning the first leg at the Stadium de Toulouse.

There may be a feeling of this competition owing them something – at the very least a crack at the knockouts again – but for Ulster, all they can do is win their first game when they meet the Sharks tomorrow, England’s second-best side by their domestic standings providing stern opposition first up.

“They’re a completely different team to when I played them five or six years ago. I played at the AJ Bell a couple of times, it was always a very physical game,” recalls Burns of his time with Gloucester.

“They’re good up front and they’ve probably got even better in that area. They have a lot of South Africans and we know that they’re typically good at the set-piece. When I played Sale, being up north, they like that rugby league style which is really good shape, threats at the line, having to double tackle.

“It’ll be a huge challenge but, off the back of a disappointing weekend, there’s no better challenge to get your teeth into than the Champions Cup.”