Cian Prendergast says his younger brother Sam showed his cojones by calmly banging over the match-winner in Saturday\u2019s engrossing Nations Championship win over the Wallabies in Sydney.<\/p>\n
Loose-forward Cian scored Ireland\u2019s opening points of the evening as he barged over from close range.<\/p>\n
But it Sam who stole the show as the 23-year-old stepped up and landed his fourth conversion of the evening to hand Ireland a 33-31 lead.<\/p>\n
It ultimately proved to be the match-winning strike as the Wallabies\u2019 replacement playmaker Ben Donaldson missed a second late penalty.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was brilliant and obviously I’m delighted for Sam to slot the kick,\u201d said Cian. \u201cI thought he was brilliant and managed the game excellently in the second half in the right areas of the field.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe kicked really well, and yeah, some set of stones on him to slot the kick at the end.\u201d<\/p>\n
Indeed. But it wasn\u2019t just the playmaker\u2019s ballsy kick.<\/p>\n
Earlier, Prendergast was flattened by a bulldozing Rob Valetini and collected the bruising blindside flanker\u2019s elbow in the head.<\/p>\n
Prendergast quickly got to his feet and then showed his composure and skill by touching the ball on several occasions ahead of Jamison Gibson-Park\u2019s try on the stroke of half-time.<\/p>\n
His unbelievable torpedo kick also sailed over the impressive Jock Campbell and found touch deep inside the Wallabies\u2019 half in the second half when Ireland was looking just a tad rugged.<\/p>\n
The performance of the duo ensured it was a happier evening for the Prendergasts, who were playing for the first time since Ireland\u2019s heavy 36-14 Six Nations defeat in Paris.<\/p>\n
\u201cI suppose like every time you play for Ireland, there’s an element of pressure. We don’t want to make it about ourselves when we both get picked together. It’s about producing a performance for Ireland, and yeah, I’m just delighted we got the result,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cObviously the game in Paris the last time we started together didn’t go the way we wanted to, so it was it was brilliant to get the result there.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Making the result all the more special was that the pair\u2019s parents \u2013 Ciara and Mark \u2013 were also in the stands.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s class. Both my parents, they arrived in on Thursday evening,\u201d Prendergast said. \u201cWe were chatting to them after. It was cool.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Making Ireland\u2019s win all the more impressive was that they did so despite the lineout coming under serious pressure.<\/p>\n
But some clever plays close to the Wallabies\u2019 line, including the try to Cian on the 10-minute mark, proved telling.<\/p>\n
As did the one to Josh van der Flier midway through the first-half as captain and hooker Dan Sheehan took a quick tap and threw an incredible ball to his flanker to barge over and score. Along the way, Sheehan drew in the entire Wallabies front-row before his no-look pass.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo score the try off the first one was nice,\u201d Prendergast said. And then to do the same move and play out the back and score was nice as well.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Prendergast credited the clever tap play to forwards coach Paul O\u2019Connell.<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cWe got the tap on Monday and then we just had a couple of reps, but I think there’s a huge emphasis on us pre- and post- training to work on those little combinations and connections like that,\u201d he said. \u201cObviously, Sheeno and Josh had worked on it together and you saw the result of it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cian Prendergast says his younger brother Sam showed his cojones by calmly banging over the match-winner in Saturday\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":534057,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,60,43],"class_list":["post-534056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534056","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=534056"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534056\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/534057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=534056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=534056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=534056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}