TOWARDS THE END of last season Sam Prendergast weighed up his options. The path he was on involved staying at Leinster and wrestling with Ciarán Frawley and the Byrne brothers for minutes at out-half. The alternative was to follow his older brother, Cian, across to Galway and become a Connacht player, where he could build experience before returning to his home province.
Connacht were keen, but in the end Prendergast decided he was happy where he was. Not that it was an easy decision.
“Did I give it thought? I suppose I did, yeah,” Prendergast says.
“Being honest, I did, and it was selfish, but it’s also from a team point of view as well. All I was thinking was how do I become the Leinster number 10?
I only want to play for Leinster and that’s where I want to achieve things.
“And it was giving the thought to, is it from going somewhere else where maybe I’ll get more game time? I ended up not thinking that was the best decision, but I did give it thought, because all I’m thinking about is how I can play more and how there’s always so much room to get better, and just how you can do that quicker and quicker.
“Eventually I just decided this is the place. Well, I suppose I never had to think about whether this was the place for me, but it was just how do I get to being the number one here. I think that’s a constant battle because there’s always people ahead of you and there’s always people coming up behind you.”
Prendergast is a confident, ambitious 21-year-old. He admits the limited minutes at Leinster can be a source of frustration but feels being part of such a competitive environment will stand to him in the long term. It’s an attitude which was echoed by Jacques Nienaber this week, with the South African outlining “if Sam’s is to represent Ireland and be the starting 10, he’s going to have to lift the players in this environment anyway.”
And Ireland is very much part of the Prendergast grand plan. After touring with Andy Farrell’s squad to South Africa over the summer, the Kildare native was the only player to start all three games on the recent Emerging Ireland tour. As expected, this week he was named in Farrell’s squad as one of three out-half options for the November internationals and will push to win his first Test cap next month.
He found the Emerging Ireland tour beneficial, using his experience from inside the Ireland senior camp to step up and lead a young squad through three games in South Africa.
With Simon Easterby and attack coach Andrew Goodman keen to load the squad with detail, there was an obvious benefit to having a 10 who was a step ahead of most of his teammates.
“It probably helped a bit that I was in [with Ireland] during the summer and I’d been in as a development player before because I knew what the calls were. So certain things I was able to prep before I was going in, but it was obviously difficult getting up to speed, because all the four provinces have different calls for different things, so just trying to get everyone’s mind around that.
“Like, there’s different defensive systems, slightly different attack systems, I suppose, and different coaches want to see different things out of you, but it’s knowing what they want and then also knowing what the Leinster coaches want to see out of me. So it’s trying to marry the two of them and just trying to play the best I can then off the back of that.”
Next month could represent a significant step in Prendergast’s journey, but before all that, he gets one final chance to showcase his talents in a Leinster jersey before joining the Ireland camp, with Prendergast starting at 10 for this evening’s URC meeting with the Lions at Aviva Stadium [KO 5.15pm, RTÉ/Premier Sports/URC TV].
He’s only had 58 minutes (v Edinburgh) in a Leinster shirt since the new campaign kicked off but impressed across his 16 appearances for the province last season. Yet he knows he’s only at the start of what he hopes will be a long, successful career.
“You look at Johnny (Sexton) who retired, I’d say he was playing some of his best rugby at what, 36/37?
“I think that’s the beauty of rugby, and playing out-half. You touch the ball so much, you’ve so many involvements, you’ve so many decisions to make. You could play, in some people’s eyes, a perfect game, but you could go back through it and you’ve made maybe 10 wrong decisions and given passes that weren’t on or were on.
“That’s the good thing. You could think you played a 10 out of 10 game, but you go back and there’s so many different things you can get better at. And that’s just because there’s so many moving parts and so many things you have to organise.
“It can be frustrating at times, but the good thing about it is you can never settle because you know there’s always something you can get better at and different things you can get better at.”
LEINSTER: Hugo Keenan; Andrew Osborne, Hugh Cooney, Robbie Henshaw, James Lowe; Sam Prendergast, Luke McGrath; Michael Milne, Gus McCarthy, Rabah Slimani; RG Snyman, Ryan Baird; Max Deegan, Josh van der Flier, Caelan Doris (capt).
Replacements: Stephen Smyth, Andrew Porter, Thomas Clarkson, Brian Deeny, James Culhane, Cormac Foley, Ross Byrne, Charlie Tector.
LIONS: Quan Horn; Richard Kriel, Henco van Wyk, Rynhardt Jonker, Edwill van der Merwe; Kade Wolhuter, Morne van den Berg; Juan Schoeman, PJ Botha, Asenathi Ntlabakanye; Ruben Schoeman, Reinhard Nothnagel; JC Pretorius, Jarod Cairns, Francke Horn (capt).
Replacements: Franco Marais, Heiko Pohlmann, RF Schoeman, Ruan Delport, Renzo du Plessis, Sanele Nohamba, Marius Louw, Erich Cronje.
Referee: Craig Evans (WRU)
