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Defence coach Denis Leamy during a Munster Rugby squad training session at the University of Limerick. Photo: Harry Murphy/Sportsfile

Munster defence coach Denis Leamy has given the young players at the province a ringing endorsement ahead of the new campaign.

T he former Ireland flanker, who made the switch from coaching Leinster this summer, says there is plenty of youthful talent in the Reds' set-up primed to make an impact.

Graham Rowntree's era in charge gets under way against Cardiff on Saturday and, with a number internationals away and Andrew Conway, RG Snyman and Gavin Coombes out injured for the opening weeks of the campaign there'll be an emphasis on the young guns.

John Hodnett is back after a long absence, while Calvin Nash, Alex Kendellen, Jack O'Sullivan and Ruadhan Quinn are available.

"It's been very good. There’s always been really good young Munster players, that doesn’t change," Leamy said.

"We’ve been very lucky that we produce an awful lot of good players over the last 25 years or whatever of professional rugby.

"So we’ve always had a good conveyor belt of players and I’ve been very interested to meet these guys and to work alongside them. The way they apply themselves, their hunger for knowledge, their ability to get up and go again, it’s really, really strong.

"So I’ve a lot of hope and I’m really looking forward to building relationships with these young guys because these guys are the future of the province. These guys are really good players and they can only get better as well."

With Leamy joining Mike Prendergast as assistants to Rowntree in a re-jigged coaching set-up, it's been a summer of change in Limerick.

Munster lost both of their pre-season games to London Irish and Gloucester and had last week off, with many of the squad attending the wedding of Peter O'Mahony in France last week.

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Leamy admits it's been difficult to pull things together in a short time-frame.

"To be honest with you, it was a big challenge. Just trying to gel everything together over the course of four or five weeks, it was a big challenge but I think we’ve done it really well in fairness," he said.

"The players, the way they’ve adapted to the style of training, to the speed we’re asking them to train at.

"If you’ve been to any of our sessions we don’t have a huge amount of huddles, we don’t talk, we just really go with our action.

"We want them to be stressed, we want them to feel fatigue. We want them doing lineouts under pressure, we want them to defending under pressure, you know attacking under fatigue and stuff like that.

"So we’ve tried to create a really tough environment through rugby, through games and by and large it’s been very effective so far.

"Look, it is early in the season and when you shorten down a pre-season like this it’s really for what you get later in the season. That fatigue factor after Christmas and that load of game after game after game – that attrition that happens over a period of time.

"So we should see, I’m hopeful we’ll see the benefits of that after Christmas and we’ll have a little bit more juice going forward.

"We've been together only a number of weeks, that's the reality of it. It's a big game on Saturday, and it's one that we will go after very, very hard.

"We have to be realistic in that it will take a little bit of time to bed in and gel. We'll go all guns blazing but there's a big picture here as well, and whatever the result is on Saturday we move on and get better and better."

Johnny Sexton stood shoulder to shoulder with American basketball superstar Steph Curry in Abbotstown yesterday, on the day Leo Cullen talked about the Ireland captain continuing with the province beyond next year’s World Cup.

American country music star Garth Brooks made a surprise visit to Limerick today.

Jack Carty has a feeling in his bones, a sense that this season is lining up well for Connacht in the way it did in 2015/’16.

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