HUGO KEENAN, JAMES Lowe and Jamison Gibson-Park are all in a race to be fit for Ireland’s opening November Test against South Africa on 5 November.

The Leinster trio have yet to feature for the province this season and with Andy Farrell set to announce his squad later this week, the Ireland head coach could have to plan without three key members of his first team.

Keenan is due to step up his rehabilitation from abdominal and knee injuries this week, but Lowe (calf) and Gibson-Park (hamstring) appear to be further off a return to action.

Leinster boss Leo Cullen has already confirmed all three players will sit out Saturday’s URC clash with Munster at the Aviva Stadium.

Speaking at Leinster’s UCD training base on Monday, senior coach Stuart Lancaster said the trio should be available “at some point” in November, but added that Andy Farrell may face a difficult decision around whether they will be ready for the demands of Test rugby.

Ireland open their November calendar with a home clash against the reigning world champions before further Dublin dates with Fiji (12 November) and Australia (19 November).

“I think they’re all getting very close,” Lancaster said of the injured trio.

“Now they’ve trained in bits and pieces with the squad but they are moving definitely in the right direction.

It’s going to be up to Andy [Farrell] as to whether he brings them into the squad and whether he runs them out in November, or waits for them to train and get robust enough and confident enough in the training to be able to put them in games or wait until after they’ve come back to play for Leinster. But they’re close.”

Leinster currently have a number of injury issues to contend with. On Monday the province confirmed hooker Rónan Kelleher will miss the November internationals as he faces an eight-week layoff with a hamstring injury. Harry Byrne is also expected to be unavailable for the same period of time with a hamstring issue, while Will Connors – who has just come through two injury ravaged seasons – is out for 12 weeks following a procedure on a bicep injury.

“Will is probably slightly different in that it’s a bicep injury, it was like an impact one, really, so he’s gone from one to another and it’s frustrating for him,” Lancaster said.

“The other ones are more like soft tissue hamstring ones so they’ll recover. I don’t think Rónan and Harry are a million miles away from getting back training again, whereas Will’s is going to be longer because he had the operation.

“You feel for Will in particular because of the injury profile he has had recently and he had worked so hard in the off-season and pre-season, and then played so well. 

“But he’ll turn it around, probably by Christmas, and then he’s still got all the interprovincial derbies, the European campaign, the Six Nations. He’s still got a long way to go before the end of the season.

Harry, we just want to make sure we get him robust enough that he can get a string of games together. I think everyone can see his quality but certainly in the last 12 months he has suffered, really, just by not being able to get that run of training and games together. 

“Yeah, you feel for him at the moment but he’s still young, he has got youth on his side. That’s the challenge for him, to be able to string those together.”

Leinster return to the Aviva Stadium this weekend for an interpro derby meeting with a Munster side who are fresh from picking up a much-needed win against the Bulls.

And Lancaster expects them to carry that momentum into this weekend’s game, where Graham Rowntree’s team will be determined to build on their most encouraging performance of the season to date.

“The confidence and the belief, you could see it in the team,” Lancaster said.

“They were very good defensively. Denis Leamy has come from a couple of years here, he understands how we defend inside out, so you talk about IP, he’s got it all. I sat next to him for two years and talked to him about it. 

“So Graham obviously will make them very competitive at set-piece time, and he’ll pride himself on the breakdown and the lineout and the scrum and the maul.

“And then Mike Prendergast has come in, from Racing ironically, and you can see the influence he’s starting to bring now. It’s a new coaching team but there’s a lot of familiar faces in there that know a lot about the Leinster lads, and they’ve got that mix of these young players coming through, who I don’t know as well but they seem pretty good to me.

“I thought it clicked, definitely, for them at the weekend, and they beat a team that beat us in the semi-final (last year), so you’ve got to give them credit for that and this weekend all bets are off because it’s Munster.”

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