Leinster Lose Jennings For Three To Four Weeks

With Leinster again playing a Friday night fixture this week against Cardiff Blues, the province’s squad had a rest day yesterday before resuming training today in UCD.

After last Friday’s game against Connacht, it has since been confirmed that flanker Shane Jennings suffered a hamstring strain in the second half and will be out for the next three to four weeks.

Everyone else came through the game relatively injury free apart from a few minor bumps and bruises. 

There was positive news with regards to Dave Kearney who continues to rehabilitate from his knee injury. He took to the pitch yesterday for the first time and is making good progress although he is still some weeks away from joining the rest of the squad. 

Similarly, Richardt Strauss has suffered no ill-effects from his first contact sessions last week and is also stepping up his rehab this week from his hamstring injury.

Having lost the opening interprovincial of the season to Connacht (10-9), winger Darragh Fanning says the Leinster squad are focusing on learning from that performance and looking ahead to getting ‘the right result’ against Cardiff.

“There’s a lot of things we have to fix. In the first 20 minutes (against Connacht) I thought we were very, very good – felt really comfortable out there, thought our set piece was going well, we were attacking well,” he said.

“We’d two good (try-scoring) chances, with the two TMO decisions just went against us. They (Connacht) got one chance and they took their one chance. At the end of the day the only stat is the result and they won.

“This week we’ve just got to focus on Cardiff, try to learn from what we did last week. We’ve got to keep setting our high standards, which we always focus on.”