Ireland head coach Richie Murphy has made two changes and a couple of positional switches to the starting team that beat England 36-24 in the Six Nations Grand Slam clinching game for Saturday’s Under-20 World Championship opening match against the same opposition at Paarl Gimnasium on Saturday (12.30 Irish time, live on Virgin Media Two).
Andrew Osborne, younger brother of Leinster’s Jamie, is named on the right wing in place of James Nicholson, who is included in the replacements, while Brian Gleeson, an outstanding performer in the Six Nations picked up a little bit of a niggle and starts on the bench.
Evan O’Connell comes into the secondrow, Diarmuid Mangan moves to blindside flanker while Ballymena’s James McNabney switches to number eight. Garryowen hooker Max Clein is set for a debut off the bench. Ireland’s preparations for the game have been hampered by significant rainfall in Cape Town that have compromised the training facilities.
Murphy explained when asked what he thought of the match venue: “We haven’t been in Paarl Gim yet. We arrived in Cape Town, our training ground was Hamilton, and unfortunately it was practically unplayable. We did a very light run on it on Wednesday, which was way below that standard that Junior World Championships should be training in.
“Today [Thursday] we got a decent run out, we got a new pitch and are in a good place now. We haven’t been at Paarl, the Captain’s Runs (there are three matches there on Saturday on the same pitch and Ireland are second on) at Paarl have been cancelled which is probably the right thing to do considering there are three games on it in a day.
“It’s going to be interesting to see how it holds up. We’ve had a member of our staff at the pitch, and he says it’s in good condition. We’ll go there with our kickers tomorrow (Friday) and get a feel for it.”
The challenge for Ireland is to demonstrate a progression in playing terms from last March if they want to claim England’s scalp for a second time. Murphy said: “I think the big thing is after the Six Nations, we talked to the players about coming back in a better place than they were in on that day.
“We’ve looked at our game really, really hard and found areas in relation to that that we needed to improve. We’ve had a number of camps leading into this. We don’t have a huge amount of game time under our belt, and that’s probably one disadvantage that we have, but what we’ve managed to do is really highlight some areas and work hard on those.”
Ireland: H McErlean (Terenure); A Osborne (Naas), H Cooney (Clontarf), J Devine (Corinthians), H Gavin (Galwegians); S Prendergast (Lansdowne), F Gunne (Terenure); G Hadden (Clontarf), G McCarthy (UCD, capt), P McCarthy (Dublin University); E O’Connell (UL Bohemian), C O’Tighearnaigh (UCD); D Mangan (UCD), R Quinn (Old Crescent), J McNabney (Ballymena). Replacements: M Clein (Garryowen), G Morris (Lansdowne), F Barrett (Corinthians), C Irvine (QUB), B Gleeson (Garryowen), O Cawley (Naas), M Lynch (Dublin University), J Nicholson (UCD).
