Munster appear confident that Jack Crowley, Jean Kleyn and Michael Milne will all be able to return for Saturday’s crucial Investec Champions Cup Pool 3 meeting with Gloucester in Cork.
Crowley missed Saturday’s disappointing 40-14 defeat to Bath with a leg injury, while Kleyn and Milne both withdrew from the starting side on the day of the game, with Kleyn having to drop out for personal reasons; Milne injured his ankle in the warm-up at the Rec.
All three players trained with the province at the University of Limerick on Tuesday, and senior coach Mike Prendergast says they are making good progress ahead of this weekend’s highly-anticipated game at SuperValu Páirc Uà Chaoimh.
“The three of them are tracking well,” Prendergast told RTÉ Sport.
“We trained today under incredibly tough conditions. There was a storm outside, nice and wet, so it was a bit of an old-school session, which is probably not a bad thing as well at times, especially when you come off a loss.
“So the boys trained, they seem to be in good stead, hopefully we’ll give them a few more days and we’ll see how they come through on Thursday.
“But they’re tracking quite well, which is really positive.”
Munster conceded four tries in the opening 19 minutes against Bath on Saturday
All three were badly missed as Munster fell to a humbling defeat to the English champions at the Rec in their pool opener on Saturday, paying a heavy price for a disastrous opening quarter where they struggled to deal with the poor weather conditions.
Five lost lineouts saw them repeatedly pinned back into their own half, while they completely lost their composure, losing Tadhg Beirne to a yellow card on five minutes after he conceded a penalty try, while Bath crossed the line twice more while he was on the sidelines.
By the 19th minute Bath were 28-0 ahead, which was the earliest a team has ever secured a four-try bonus-point since the introduction of the BP in 2003.
With the province hosting a first ever Champions Cup game at the home of Cork GAA this week, both a result and a performance will be needed.
“There was disappointment yesterday morning, there’s no point saying there wasn’t,” added Prendergast, who was among the try-scorers the last time Munster played a Champions Cup game in Cork, a 64-0 defeat of Viadana in 2002.
“We’re a very proud club, very proud people, both as players and as staff.
“We felt we weren’t where we needed to be. We had 4,000 people over at the Bath game, it was an incredible support and we felt that we needed to give them more.
“Like any game, there is a next week and that’s this week.
“It’s a small bit different again, we’re going down to Páirc Uà Chaoimh. We’ve played down there twice.
“We’ve had two good days out there in South Africa against the Crusaders, albeit they’re friendly games.
“This is obviously a Champions Cup. It’s much different, higher stakes, but there’s huge excitement around it. Obviously, from a performance point of view, we know we need to be better than we were last weekend.
“So there’s a huge amount to look forward to. There’s good excitement around the place and there’s a nice build-up to it. As I said, we had a good training today.
“We had a good old-school training. Sometimes you need that. It gets the blood flowing and that’s something that we probably needed.”