Ulster second row Alan O’Connor says his side will draw on past wins away to French sides when they face La Rochelle in Saturday’s Champions Cup game.

Ulster have lost five of their last six games, including defeats at Sale and at home to their opponents this weekend.

“We will play with a positive winning mindset,” said O’Connor.

“We’re looking forward now and not going into our shell. We back ourselves no matter who we are playing. Otherwise why bother turning up?”.

Dan McFarland’s team were 29-23 victors at Clermont Auvergne last term and went on to win 26-20 on the road against then European champions Toulouse, before agonisingly bowing out of the knockout stages on an aggregate score following a 30-23 loss to the French side in the second leg in Belfast.

After making an impressive start to this season, a recent slump in results has dented their hopes but with qualification for the knockout stages of the Champions Cup still a possibility and URC ambitions still very much alive, there is plenty to play for.

“We’re the same team we were a couple of months ago, just results haven’t gone our way and we haven’t performed how we know we can,” added O’Connor.

“All it is going to take is a big performance and we know we have plenty of those in our team, so why not another this weekend?

“It’s a big challenge but we played there a couple of years ago and it’s a really good place to play, a class atmosphere, so we’ll enjoy it and go out all guns blazing.

“A good lot of the guys who won last year against Clermont will be playing and we have had some massive away wins in the past.

“Why can’t we go to La Rochelle and win just because they are European champions. We went to Toulouse last year when they were European champions and won so we are confident.”

O’Connor explains that the Ulster squad have been focusing on making small improvements individually and as a group as they try to turn results in their favour.

“We’re doing a lot of good stuff, it’s just about nailing those moments that are in front of you. We’ve just been on the wrong side of a couple of big moments and decision-making. It’s small margins at this level.

“We’ve just got to keep the faith and stick to our processes – we have standards about how we want to play and train every day, we just have to make sure we don’t deviate from those.

“We come in with the mindset of getting better by a small bit every time, limiting individual mistakes and keeping concentration, especially in the last few minutes of games, as those are the ones that really count.”

Confidence from Dublin second-half display

Ulster’s first encounter with La Rochelle this season was controversially switched to Dublin’s Aviva Stadium and played behind closed doors after their Kingpsan Stadium pitch was deemed unplayable the day before the game.

The Irish side trailed 29-0 at half-time but bounced back in the second half, scoring four tries and salvaging a second bonus point courtesy of their eventual seven-point losing margin, 36-29.

“We took some learnings from that and can take a lot of confidence from what we can do when we have the ball – go through the phases and put them under pressure.

“Our maul went well whenever [Will] Skelton [Australian second row] went off so we’ll definitely have a plan and look forward to that challenge.

“They have big forwards so we need to move them about and put them under pressure in ways they don’t encounter much in France as a lot of their teams play in quite a similar way.

“We can’t have the same outcome as the first half at the Aviva, we need to maybe give them something different, produce what we did in the second half.”