A DAY after Portlaoise\u2019s Conor Kelly was named on the Ireland Club to play Scotland on Friday, a second Laois player will don the Irish jersey also on Friday night.<\/p>\n
When head coach Andrew Browne today named the Ireland U\/20s match day squad for Friday night\u2019s U\/20s Six Nations clash between Ireland and Italy at Virgin Media Park (kick-off 7.45pm, live on RT\u00c92) it included Lee Fitzpatrick.<\/p>\n
Lee Fitzpatrick is proud of the fact that he started his rugby career in Portarlington RFC ad even from an early age his potential was obvious.<\/p>\n
After Portarlington Fitzpatrick, who plays as a hooker, went to school in Cistercian College Roscrea, before moving to Newbridge College.<\/p>\n
After leaving secondary school he moved to Blackrock College where has made a couple of appearances with their senior team playing in AIL Division 1B, no mean achievement for a lad who turned 19 just a coup[le of weeks ago.<\/p>\n
Having already represented Leinster and Ireland at Under-18 level, the Laois native was named in the Ireland Under-18 Schools squad that toured South Africa in July last year for a series of games against South African and Georgian international teams.<\/p>\n
Last November Fitzpatrick again faced up to South Africa when Ireland Under-20s played them in Virgin Media Park, Cork. While the game did not go the way Ireland would have wanted, Fitzpatrick nevertheless delivered a fine performance in the front row.<\/p>\n
At the start of the current season, Fitzpatrick was one of nine age-grade internationals to join the Leinster Academy where he has already impressed his mentors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A DAY after Portlaoise\u2019s Conor Kelly was named on the Ireland Club to play Scotland on Friday, a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":292750,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,60,43],"class_list":{"0":"post-292749","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ireland","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=292749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292749\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/292750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}