Speaking ahead of the match Cardiff Blues Director of Rugby David Young said,

"The frustrating thing for me is, for season on season, we are awfully slow starters. I think last season, for the first three games we were very poor."

"You can't peak for 10 months, but we certainly want to be better."

"The attitude from the players is to work harder. A few people wrote us off at the start of last season but we cracked on and got things right."

The Blues know it will be a hard task to get the right result in Limerick as the Munstermen have won their last seven home games in all competitions since Ulster were victorious at Thomond Park Stadium on 3 January.

A Welsh side has not won at Thomond Park since the Dragons were the visitors on 12 March 2004.

Reflecting on last Friday's narrow defeat to Edinburgh at the Cardiff City Stadium, David Young said,

"Certainly for 50 minutes of the Edinburgh match we we're only just hanging in there."

"However, we showed a lot of character to come back into the game."

"As I've told the players, when you hit top gear things become easy, but we are certainly far from top gear now."

"We did one or two things a lot better in the second half. Obviously we've got to build on the things we do well and work on other things."

Starting XV
1 John Yapp
2 Rhys Thomas
3 Taufa'ao Filise
4 Deiniol Jones
5 Paul Tito
6 Mamma Molitika
7 Robin Sowden-Taylor
8 Xavier Rush

9 Gareth cooper
10 Ceri Sweeney
11 Chris Czekaj
12 Dafydd Hewitt
13 Gareth Thomas
14 Leigh Halfpenny
15 Ben Blair

Replacements
16 Gary Powell
17 Gareth Williams
18 Scott Morgan
19 Andy Powell
20 Richie Rees
21 Sam Norton-Knight
22 Dafydd James