Chiefs fly-half Steenson has told the Irish Examiner that after five seasons of European disappointment since making their Champions Cup debut, and only one quarter-final appearance, the Devon club are determined to learn from past mistakes.

“We’ve put a focus on it this year and we feel we’re in a good place with the squad, that we have to go and give it a good go,” said Steenson.

“We have underachieved, if we’re being absolutely honest. We’re in a situation now where last season we were definitely frustrated to not have qualified out of the group, given the position that we were in as Premiership champions.

“We talked about what it would mean going into the competition as English champions and so to not qualify out of the pool was frustrating.

Even more disquieting for Munster is that the Chiefs are far from satisfied with their start to the campaign, the most recent of which was a bonus-point victory at a fully-loaded Bath eight days ago.

Ulsterman Steenson, 32, even pointed to a lack of ruthlessness: “There’s a few performances in there and in certain games where we’ve maybe let ourselves down, where we feel we haven’t put in a full 80-minute performance, so the ultimate goal is to keep striving to get that and it would be great if we could do it this weekend.

“It’s been right across our game. I think there’s been moments where we’ve had a little lapse in concentration; maybe got ourselves into a good position and maybe not been as ruthless as we possibly could be, so we’re very aware that it’s an 80-minute game and we’re striving for that performance.

“We’re still relatively new as a European side, but I think now we’ve had enough years in the competition to definitely be in a position with the squad that we have that we can go after the competition, but we know we’ve got to start well. We’re at home this weekend and we’ve got to really look to get a good result to give ourselves a good foothold in the group moving forward.”