WITH HIS CONTRACT due to run out at the end of the season, Dominic Ryan says he is hoping he can do enough this year to extend his stay at Leinster for the foreseeable future.

Ryan’s game time was limited last year with strong competition for places at the province, nevertheless he is optimistic that he can progress further in the coming months.

“I could have got more game time [last year], but it’s a new season now, so I’m focusing on this season.

“I know what I’m doing. Coaches know what I can do. So I don’t think I have anything to prove. I’ll just play my game and hopefully that’s good enough.

“Of course I’d like to stay with Leinster, it’s where I grew up, but we’ll see how things go in the future.”

Ryan featured in his side’s disappointing loss to Connacht last Friday, and he says the team know where improvement is needed.

“We haven’t had a video session yet, but we know ourselves, we were in a controlling position in the first half, we got ourselves in a lot of good positions and we really didn’t finish opportunities we should have finished. Credit to Connacht, they put it up to us in a very physical game. But we really felt we could’ve won it.

“We tried to play with the ball too much around the midfield. We ended up forcing it a bit and feeding into Connacht’s hands, because they weren’t going to give in easily.

“We could’ve played territory better. That’s the main thing — things went well in the RDS, and maybe Connacht were giving us a bit more heat than the Scarlets did. We’ve been progressing slowly. There were very good elements to our performance. We just didn’t come away with the right result.”

Ryan also says he is wary of Leinster’s upcoming opponents Cardiff, singling out Rhys Patchell as a key player.

“They’re tough. They were in the game at half-time [against Ulster]. Rhys Patchell was hitting kicks over from all areas of the pitch, so it’s really important to have good discipline against them — you see him taking them from inside his own half.

“I don’t know what went wrong for them in the second half, but I’d say they’re hurting about being so close and then losing at home by a decent margin.”

Meanwhile, Ryan has been impressed by new signing Kane Douglas, who looks set to start in Friday’s clash.

“We just did a walkthrough of the lineouts and already you can see his class. He’s an international second row because he takes the lineouts up so quickly. To see how he did it this morning was very impressive.”

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