Tough love for Jack Crowley as big opportunity knocks for Sam Prendergast

Earlier this week when Jack Crowley was rostered for media duties along with Paul O’Connell, James Ryan and Josh van der Flier in the High Performance Centre at Sport Ireland, the impression he gave was not that of a player who knew that Sam Prendergast would be starting at outhalf against Australia.
Crowley spoke with confidence about the regular turbulence around the position and defaulted to how the team always comes first and that sitting it out against Fiji served not to deter ambition, but to grow his hunger to play.
The Munster outhalf was the player who went to the World Cup with Ross Byrne and Johnny Sexton and this year started at 10 in all five of Ireland’s matches in the Six Nations. Crowley, as players say, had the shirt, although the consistent and contradictory mantra across all positions is that there is never ownership of the green jersey.
That much was made crystal clear on Thursday by the final selection decision of Andy Farrell before he goes on sabbatical from his Irish coaching job to prepare the Lions for Australia next summer. As the Lions tour finishes in August, he won’t have a coaching role with this group of players until the Autumn Nations Series this time next year.
Most team selections are a statement of sorts by the coach because they are about his preferences. Prendergast over Crowley, however, seems more strident and consequential. The coach appeared to be saying that he was not wholly convinced who the starting Irish outhalf will be for the 2025 Six Nations and beyond.
Farrell saw what positive things Prendergast could do last weekend against a poor Fiji side and some of his limitations. He knows too that Australia will offer a greater challenge and have the ability to put Prendergast’s game under more scrutiny and find more stress points, particularly with the meticulous Joe Schmidt coaching against him.
Prendergast’s defence will be tested more rigorously and the Australian back row will target him and disrupt his passing game to a greater degree than Fiji were able to do.
The run will also give Farrell and his coaching team a chance to see how Prendergast and scrumhalf Jamison Gibson-Park combine as the halfback pairing. Against Fiji Craig Casey started and Conor Murray was on the bench.
It will be an acid test of personality for Prendergast and his insouciant style, but sitting on the bench is an even greater examination of Crowley’s character. How he reacts to being overlooked and how he addresses the crushing disappointment will define his mettle as a Test match player.
It’s a challenge Crowley has never had to deal with before, the squad competition with injury-hampered Joey Carbery in Munster not of the same magnitude, and it may take some mental adjustment for him to process his current position as an 18 cap, 24-year-old being squeezed by a two cap, 21-year-old.
It is a different kind of stress to sitting behind Johnny Sexton, earning game minutes in Test matches and stepping into the position the moment the veteran outhalf retired. Ciaran Frawley, another contender, has never started for Ireland at 10.
Farrell understands competitive tension and responsibility with the young respective age of the two players of no concern to him as his ruthless, decisive streak comes from his lived experience as a player across two codes.
“Pressure’s good,” he said yesterday. “It’s what concentrates the mind, you see where your character’s at.”
Farrell made his debut for professional Rugby League side Wigan at 16-years-old, the age he also became a father, and he was captain of England by the age of 21. As a teenage dad he rose at 5.30am to train before cycling across Wigan to work as an apprentice joiner. In the evenings after work he trained with the team.
Farrell can be a soft shoulder, but he also won the Man of Steel award twice as a rugby league player. Fight is part of his competitive DNA and Prendergast has had to fight to get game time with his club to set him up with this Irish start.
The Leinster environment is a shark pool compared to the other provinces with Prendergast swimming with Frawley, Ross and Harry Byrne and in the coming months or years an Austrian-born teenager in the Academy called Casper Gabriel, who Leinster plucked straight from school at Terenure College.
Under the watchful gaze of David Humphreys, Leo Cullen, Jacques Nienaber and Guy Easterby, Gabriel came on for Harry Byrne in the final 10 minutes of Leinster’s recent ‘A’ match win over Munster ‘A’ in Dublin.
One thing Prendergast and Crowley should understand if they are to survive their dog-eat-dog environment, where they are now the two principal contenders, is that who plays at outhalf is a never-ending saga.
The battle for the 10 shirt has always been a story with twisting chapters and subplots reaching back to Tony Ward and Ollie Campbell in the 1980s, Ronan O’Gara and Humphries and even involving the Irish coach’s family with Owen Farrell battling for over a decade with George Ford for the England 10 shirt, Marcus Smith muscling in over the last three years.
Tough love for Crowley and a vote of confidence for Prendergast. Drama again in the playmaker’s position. It was ever thus.