Ryan Ready For Championship Challenge

Munster academy back-row Ryan Murphy starts in his first Junior World Championship tomorrow evening for Ireland U20s when they take on Australia.

We caught up with the Dolphin club man as he looks forward to his first start in the JWC.

"I really just can’t wait for it now. we’ve been training really hard all year and have had a good few camps over the last few weeks and we’re just looking forward to togging out against Australia who are first up.

From talking to Luke McGrath and Josh Van Der Flier who have been involved before, we know the games come fairly rapidly at you and you’re playing a full international every few days so the body doesn’t have much time to recover.

We have ended up in a tough pool (Australia, Fiji, New Zealand) but we are a confident bunch and we feel we didn’t really show our true ability in the 6 Nations so we certainly won’t fear anyone. These are the teams you want to play, and you want to measure yourself against sides like that to see how you come up against them. This competition is a collection of the best players from around the world at this level so it’s something you want to front up for.

Errors cost us with the away defeats in the 6 Nations and at the end going away to Italy it was just an average 6 Nations for us where we really could have competed if we had cut out the mistakes in the earlier games. We came up against tough opposition, against physical sides so hopefully those games will stand to us in the next few weeks. I fortunately got to start in all of the games so I just hope I can continue that form now for the World Cup.

We’re a close knit group in the U20s, we get on well with each other and there’s always good banter. From a Munster point of view it helps that Greig Oliver (Munster Elite Development Officer and Irish U20s Backs Coach) is involved and he has been great with us this year, just at the end of a call always and he’ll go through patterns and plays with us so it’s good to have him there also.

I’ve played with Sean (McCarthy), Sweets (Darren Sweetnam) and Rory (Scannell) since we were at U18 level so we’re together for a few years now and it’s great to head away with your buddies, and hopefully get a few wins together!"

Pool B Fixtures – Junior World Championship 2013 (All times are local)
05 Jun, 18:45 Ireland – Australia Stade de la Rabine, Vannes
05 Jun, 20:45 New Zealand – Fiji Stade de la Rabine, Vannes
09 Jun, 18:45 Ireland – Fiji Stade de la Rabine, Vannes
09 Jun, 20:45 New Zealand – Australia Stade de la Rabine, Vannes
13 Jun, 18:45 New Zealand – Ireland Stade de la Rabine, Vannes
13 Jun, 20:45 Australia – Fiji Stade de la Rabine, Vannes