Former Ireland winger Luke Fitzgerald has delivered an enthusiastic update on Sam Prendergast five months after claiming he was a defensive liability whose weaknesses couldn’t be fixed by weights in the gym.
The 2009 Six Nations Grand Slam winner was hugely critical last May of the Ireland and Leinster player, who played himself out of Test and provincial selection with a series of error-strewn performances. Prendergast was axed as the Ireland No.10 after two Six Nations matches, and the same thing happened at Leinster as he was omitted from their squad for the Champions Cup final.
However, the 23-year-old was soon back in favour under Leo Cullen. After guiding Leinster to their back-to-back title success in the United Rugby Championship, he then took advantage of Jack Crowley’s injury to take back the Ireland out-half berth for the July Nations Championship matches against Australia and New Zealand.
With Crowley now unavailable until the new year, Prendergast is tipped to retain the Ireland jersey for a Nations Championship November campaign where the highlight is the clash with South Africa at Aviva Stadium.
“He looks like he has matured quite nicely…”
Ahead of the Ireland squad selection on Wednesday, Prendergast has put in two man of the match performances for Leinster, starting with the URC win over Cardiff and following it with last Saturday’s away Champions Cup victory at Clermont.
This impressive form has resulted in Fitzgerald delivering a very different verdict to the putdown voiced some months ago. Back then, the retired 34-cap international who toured with the 2009 British and Irish Lions took umbrage over a missed tackle from Prendergast in a URC match against the Lions the week after he had slipped up in the Europe versus Toulon.
“That tells you everything,” he said at the time. “No weights are going to fix that. No weights are going to fix you putting your arms together like that when you are about to tackle someone for the disallowed try. I don’t know.
“It’s his head, it’s not his body. I fecking hate this; this is awful. I hate being in this position every week, but you leave me with no choice. I have to say what I see. I look back at that incident and said, ‘That’s weird how that collision happened’.
“I slowed it down to the point of contact, and he [Prendergast] has got his arms together and looking away. I was like, ‘This is rugby. You have to enjoy contact otherwise you are never going to be the person to bring Leinster back to the top table, to the top of the European game’. It’s disappointing and I’m just getting more and more worried about it.”
That concern appears to have been alleviated by Fitzgerald’s latest assessment of Prendergast, describing him as more filled out in the body and also suggesting a change in attitude when it comes to defending.
Appearing on The Left Wing podcast, he said: “He [Prendergast] is magic to watch. I love watching him in full flow and love seeing some of the beautiful handling skills that are on show, his offloading and most of his pre-contact stuff.
“I still think he has some faults, right? But he looks like he has matured quite nicely. He’s filled out in the body a little bit; looks like he’s quite physical. He’s always been a little bit quicker than he looks, but he looks like he has even sharpened up on that.
“This is a big season for him, and if you look at his key competition, it’s Crowley, even though (Ciaran) Frawley looks like he is emerging. He looks like he is catching up on the physical stakes a little bit now. Can he deliver on the other side of the ball? That’s probably going to be the big question for him.
“It looks like the kicking has settled down a little bit. I still think he looks so square on it that I don’t love the look of the approach into the ball from the deck, but he has a big boot out of hand. If he catches one, he can really ping it. And then he does have the other more subtle ones, too.
“So yeah, I loved watching him. I thought he was really good. I thought he commanded the game (against Clermont) quite well. Even though (Fintan) Gunne did run the pack reasonably well, he did struggle in some of the other aspects and I thought Prendergast did deal with that very well.
“The passing isn’t as sharp as he would usually get from a (Jamison) Gibson-Park or a (Craig) Casey if he is in the Irish team, so that doesn’t help, but I thought he managed it very well and you can see the array of skills. On a day like that when the pack is going forward, he had really eye-catching, spectacular moments.”
Fitzgerald then mentioned a post-match given by Prendergast which included a comment that suggested to him the No.10 now had a better mentality towards his defensive duties. “It’s a good sign of a guy that he is able to bounce back and looks confident so quickly,” he said. “What you really want to see now is that he delivers.
“I loved hearing him talk about his game. He was talking about how against a good team that you will be defending for 50 per cent of the time if not more. I heard him use that, he said 50 per cent somewhere. To me, that’s a recognition that he has to be better on that side of the ball and the rest of the game, that feeds into your game if you’re doing those things.
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“As much as I was giving out about that and it looked like he wasn’t trying, no matter who you are, that starts eating in on you because you’re not contributing on the other side of the ball. You have to contribute. No one expects you to be Josh van der Flier recklessly going into tackles at the ankles of a big player, but people do expect you to put your body on the line when the time’s there for the team and that feeds through confidence.
“Confidence of the guys around you, how you feel in the dressing room, and it sounded to me like he has kind of recognised that when I heard him throw out that number. To me, that is very positive. Once he gets that to a certain place that it’s acceptable on the other side of the ball, he then gets to go and play his game and play what he sees and be what we know he is great at.
“That is on the attacking side of the ball with that flair, playing heads-up rugby, putting guys into space, the little subtlety around delay passing, all that kind of stuff. We get to see all what Sam Prendergast is really about because he has been better on the other side of the ball.”