DOMINIC RYAN SHAKES his head and lets out a rueful laugh when asked about last season.
‘I’ve already answered that,’ he says patiently after being questioned about how he felt being consigned to the British and Irish Cup squad for the majority of last year. You can tell by his tone that he has been regularly quizzed about last season’s travails but he says his confidence never wavered.
Ryan was restricted to minor cameos for Leinster’s first team last season – he probably wouldn’t even have been listed in the credits were he an actor – but injuries to Sean O’Brien, Jordi Murphy and Kevin McLaughlin have opened the door for the Gonzaga flanker to move into the starting XV this year.
For Ryan, playing every week is just validating a belief he already had.
“I’ve always believed that I’m up there with any of the back rows in the country,” Ryan said after winning man of the match in Leinster’s 33-8 win over Edinburgh at the RDS.
“I finally got a chance to show it and it is going well so far so hopefully I can stay where I am at the moment.”
Leinster fans might hope the same thing after Ryan helped himself to two tries last night – albeit at the back of two very powerful mauls. Leinster haven’t been as clinical this season as in previous years so the five-try performance was something that pleased Ryan but he rejected the cliché that Leinster ‘needed to turn a corner’ after some poor early-season results.
“We haven’t been going as well as we should be in the league so it was important to get a bonus point,” Ryan said.
“I don’t know if we actually had a corner to turn but we did have a few things we needed to get right with the few injuries that we had. We have a lot of young guys shifting around the squad and it has taken us a few weeks to gel.”
After breaking into the provincial team this year, the next step for Ryan is trying to get some national recognition. That is tougher again given the sizeable back row representation from other provinces in Joe Schmidt’s squad as well as from his own team but Ryan is happy to continue to put himself in the shop window every week for Leinster.
“At the moment Leinster is where I can show what I can do,” Ryan said.
“It is a platform for me to showcase my ability to Joe. I was happy with my performance tonight but I can’t really take credit for my two tries because I was behind a good pack. You get the credit for it but they were really pack tries.”
Leinster blitzed Edinburgh in the opening minutes with Ryan and Jack Conan giving Leinster a commanding lead early on but it took them until the second half before they started firing again. Ryan acknowledged that his side need to work a bit more on their efficiency when in the ascendancy.
“In the second half of the first half we might have mentally switched off a bit when we went ahead and that is something that we have to work on,” Ryan said.
“We need to keep our foot on the gas when we are ahead instead of letting teams back into the game. Now that we have ironed out some of the positional issues in the team maybe we can switch to working on the mental approach to situations like that.”
He also praised the performance of recent academy graduate Conan at no 8, whose progress has mirrored Ryan’s in recent weeks.
“Jack is going well,” Ryan said.
“He is very talented and he is a big man for a young man. I like playing with him. He is a very strong carrier and I think he can impose himself even more on the game if he gets into the right places a bit better.”
