RUGBY DAILY | "It's a pretty fickle game" - Sam Prendergast | URC round up | New scrum coach for Connact
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Football on Off the Ball. So Arsenal fans go, if we don't win the league, it will be slightly offset by Spurs going down. And Spurs say, well, if we do go down, it will be offset by Arsenal not winning the league. So they're going to be drowning their sorrows in Chardon for it, I think, to an extent. Join in the obsession. Subscribe now at offtheball.com forward slash join. Off the balls, Rugby Daily. With Bank of Ireland, a proud sponsor of Connacht, Leinster, Munster and Ulster Rugby. Never stop competing.
Welcome along to Monday's Rugby Daily. I'm Susanna Mollen. Coming up today, we've plenty of rugby to look back on as all four provinces were in action in the URC. Ireland also got their first win of this year's Guinness Women's Six Nations in front of a record-breaking crowd in Galway. And Connacht have a new scrum coach from the Premiership. First up then, we saw wins for three of the provinces in the United Rugby Championship over the weekend. Leinster found the complete performance they'd been waiting for to see off Ulster 29-21 up in Belfast. Starting at out half for the first time since Leinster's heavy defeat to Glasgow in March, Sam Prendergast showed his spark with a fan-voted player-of-the-match performance.
Speaking after the game with Premier Sports, he was delighted with the platform his troops gave him.
It's a pretty special feeling to be fair. I think we spoke a lot during the week that this group, a lot of us played in Glasgow a few weeks back. A very frustrating game and we came away annoyed with maybe what we put out there. And I think when you look at what we put out there today, probably especially the first 50, 60 minutes, it was really good. I thought the forwards were unbelievable. Having Eddie back was brilliant. I thought, yeah, they just gave us an unbelievable platform and it was a lot easier to play with that. Yeah, you talk about Glasgow even looking slightly before that. You know, how proud are you of how you've come back to get a man on the match performance today and lead this team?
To be honest with you, yeah, it's a pretty fickle game. But I think when your teammates are that good, I think it makes it a lot easier, to be honest, in terms of how close we are. And when they play like that on the pitch, it just makes my job a lot easier.
Also happy to be back in the Leinster Blue was prop Ed Byrne. Rejoining the province on a short-term loan from Cardiff amid Leinster's deepening front row crisis, he was brought on on the 46th minute for now first-choice loosehead Gerry Kerr. Despite the quick turnaround, he said it felt good to be back on Irish soil.
Yeah, this was incredible.
What rugby matches were highlighted in the URC this weekend?
It was a very special week. I was thrown straight back into it Monday afternoon. Yeah! Straight back into the Monday afternoon. In fairness, the lads helped out a lot during the week with the info and stuff. It was unbelievable to be back. Obviously, a bit of a quick turnaround from when you came over this week and straight into a game. Were you thinking all week about your memories with Leinster and bringing that all back? Was it rushing back in when you entered the doors? Yeah, it was a bit of everything, to be honest. The big thing I want to be is extremely thankful to Cardiff for giving me this opportunity and Cornelio van Zyl. We had a good chat over the weekend. It all happened very quickly but they were unbelievably decent.
I went in Monday morning just to say goodbye to the lads. That was tough to be honest because I really enjoyed my time there. They're an unbelievable bunch of lads and I'm really rooting for them to get top eight now. But then flipping the page quickly into the week here was incredibly special and catching up with all the lads you were playing with for so long was incredible to be honest.
Ulster, however, will be disappointed with their performance at home on Saturday. Despite three second-half tries from the Ward brothers, they couldn't add the crucial fourth after trailing 29-0 with 51 minutes played. Speaking to Premier Sports after the game, head coach Richie Murphy said they had to credit Leinster's brilliance, but he was also disappointed in some late decisions from referee Andrew Brace.
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