Tighthead prop Tadhg Furlong, winger James Lowe and hooker Rónan Kelleher are back training with the Ireland squad as they face into their final game in this year’s Six Nations against Italy on Saturday in Rome with hopes that all three will be available to play.
Centre Garry Ringrose is also back in the squad following his suspension for a dangerous tackle in Ireland’s game against Wales.
Furlong, who left the Irish warm-weather training camp in Portugal in January with a calf injury has missed Ireland’s four games of this year’s championship, while Lowe pulled out of the match against France due to a back spasm picked up in the team warm-up last weekend.
“Yeah, they’re both making good progress. Tadhg was back training, he’s been involved with the team the last little bit but was out there and fully involved today. Yeah, he is available to play,” said Irish backs coach Andrew Goodman. “Obviously, Garry is back from his suspension as well and Mack Hansen is available. “Yeah, he [Furlong] is available to play.”
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Furlong also missed out on Ireland’s Autumn Nations Series last year and has not played a match since Leinster’s Champions Cup win over La Rochelle on January 12th.
“It’s great for him [Furlong],” added Goodman. “It’s been a tough period for him. With Tadhg and the history of the injury, we had to make sure he’s right. We didn’t want to get him back in and have another setback so we’ve been a little bit cautious with this one to make sure that he’s 100 per cent right, so he can come back in and feel confident and comfortable.”
Both Lowe and Kelleher were involved in Irish training on Tuesday morning at the High-Performance Centre in the Sport Ireland campus in Dublin.
“They were both out there on the field today running around, so it’s looking pretty good,” said Goodman, who also dispelled concerns over outhalf Sam Prendergast. The 22-year-old had his knee strapped during the session.
“He’s just had a cut, nothing major there. He’ll be fine, yeah,” said Goodman, who described the last few nights since France beat Ireland 42-27 in Aviva Stadium as restless.
“It was a very restless couple of nights post Saturday’s performance. It was tough to watch and even tougher to watch back so there’s a lot of analysis that goes into it as a coach and conversations as a coaching group. The first place we look is where we could have been better as a group of coaches to set the players up.
“The energy is obviously down a little bit because it’s a performance we weren’t proud of. We had a good week leading up to it and there were reasons around 50th caps and some great men playing their last home game, as well as destiny being in our hands.
“Now that’s taken away so it was a tough couple of days. So on Monday, energy levels get built back up and we have to come back in bouncing today because the most important thing now is a response. We need to go out there a put out our best performance and for our fans, we want to give them something good to watch.”
