Ireland and Connacht playing ‘wait and see’ on Hansen

Mack Hansen remains sidelined for Connacht with a shoulder injury ahead of their final round BKT URC clash against Leinster on Friday night.

The Ireland wing hasn’t played since dislocating his shoulder against Munster on New Year’s Day.

Connacht had hoped that the 26-year-old would feature before the end of the regular season but the game at the RDS (7.35pm) has come too soon for the Australian native, who has scored nine tries in 21 Ireland appearances.

“Still no Mack and I don’t expect him to be available for Leinster either,” said head coach Pete Wilkins, who will also be without scrum-half Matthew Devine (ribs).

“It’s a week-to-week prospect but he’s not back to the stage where he can be doing his full return to contact work yet, to test out the shoulder.

“There’s no panic but it’s frustrating for him and it’s frustrating for us because we’d prefer to have him available.”

Asked about Hansen’s chances of featuring in Ireland’s summer tour of South Africa, with Tests on 6 and 13 July, Wilkins said: “The honest answer is I don’t really have a hard timeline for him.

“It’s been very much open-ended for the last six weeks, which has been frustrating but it’s just where he finds himself at with the injury.

“So there’s nothing to suggest that he wouldn’t make it back for the play-offs or the summer tour, but the experience of the last month or so means that we won’t take anything for granted and we’ll just wait and see.”

Connacht, who will welcome back Shane Jennings and Denis Buckley, sit in tenth place in the table and need a bonus-point win to sneak into the play-offs, a finish that requires results from the Benetton-Edinburgh and Stormers v Lions Saturday games to go their way.

“The mentality is positive and it is last-chance saloon,” admitted Wilkins.

“It’s very much a cup final feel for us. It’s not because of the excitement of achieving a final, it’s because this is it really – do or die.

“We put ourselves in this position and we haven’t got anyone else to blame. We’ve done it before and we’re doing it again so it’s all guns blazing, and we need to [hope] a couple of other things go our way in the other fixtures.”

Leinster, third in the table, will come into the game off the back of a fourth loss in five games, the Investec Champions Cup final defeat to Toulouse in a match that went to extra time.

Wilkins said the hosts’ motivation will be discussed but conceded that they can’t afford to focus too much on something that is out of their hands.

“In terms of calibrating the right mindset for ourselves, you have to be aware of where the opposition are coming from and what they are arriving with, too,” added the Englishman.

“We’ve discussed it but it’s impossible to know exactly and there’s a danger [that] in the past we’ve tried to look too much into what the opposition motivations might be or state of mind

“Quite often something that happens in the first five minutes can totally change that.

“We’ve been in games before where opposition teams have arrived with a flatter mindset than usual and then, whether we’ve given them penalties or cheap scores, or simply got in their faces and they’ve reacted to that, we’ve certainly given them massive incentive to find something out of the occasion.

“We’ve got to be careful with how we use that but it would equally be silly not to see the fact they are coming off a tough result themselves, a shorter turnaround but they are desperate for a win so it will be really interesting in that respect.”

We need your consent to load this comcast-player contentWe use comcast-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences

On the match at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, he said: “It was an incredible game. Two high-quality teams and when you see the calibre of that contest it shows why they are, certainly this season, the two best teams in Europe.

“I think Leinster will be frustrated with the opportunities they had early on but I think as well Toulouse’s class, not just to keep them at arm’s reach but also to accelerate away in extra time, it was mightily impressive.

“So look, a good game for the neutral, I suppose.”

Watch Munster v Ulster in the URC on Saturday from 5pm on RTÉ2 and RTÉ Player, follow a live blog on rte.ie/sport and the RTÉ News app and listen to commentary on Saturday Sport on RTÉ Radio 1