Hugo Keenan hopes sevens switch will pay off at Olympics

Keenan’s temporary switch from the 15-a-side game to the Ireland sevens squad hasn’t quite resulted in him being kicked out of the Ireland or Leinster player WhatsApp groups, but he has got a “fair share of slagging” from his team-mates about his move.

His decision to take a sojourn to the sevens meant he missed Leinster’s knockout games in the URC and he also misses Ireland two-Test tour of South Africa. Keenan saw his team-mates in Andy Farrell’s squad at the IRFU’s High Performance Centre before they left for South Africa, while he trained with his new team-mates in the sevens squad. No hard feelings?

“It’s all been a bit of craic, but yeah they’ve given me a bit of a hard time and rightly so,” Keenan smiles. “You’re in training in the HPC and we all share the same facilities and they’ve got their rooms and we’ve got ours.

“I’ve caught up with the whole squad and it’s just the normal banter and slagging that I’ve had. So it’s all been good-natured and good craic.”

While Keenan – who left the sevens programme after a two-season spell in 2019 – will chase a different kind of metal at the Stade de France in three weeks’ time, it wasn’t easy for him to watch from afar as Leinster were beaten in the URC semi-final in South Africa last month.

“It was tough not being involved in Leinster, closing out the season with them. It definitely wasn’t how I hoped the season would go for me or Leinster. It wasn’t the plan losing the Champions Cup final and after that was again hugely disappointing.

“Now it’s been tough not being down in South Africa [with Ireland] because you’d love to test yourself against the best team in the world, the World Cup champs, in their back yard.

“But that’s the sacrifice and decision I had to make if I wanted to put my hand up for selection for the Olympics. Hopefully in a month’s time now the decision will have paid off for me.”

Keenan said it was only a week or two before the Champions Cup final in May that he made the final decision to join the sevens because “ultimately it was too hard to turn down”. He admits there were nerves, first day of school kind of nerves, when he went to meet the sevens squad. While Antoine Dupont’s sevens stint with the France team seems to have elevated his 15s game, Keenan also hopes it will boost his game.

“I’m hoping that this will be a little jumpstart in the middle of my career to kick me on. Give me a little boost in my 15s career after. That was another reason for doing it. To improve as a player, to challenge myself both on the pitch but also the mental side of it. The whole experience of going to the Olympics, the pressure around that, I think I can transfer that into the 15s side when I return.”

And trying to win an Olympic medal for Ireland was also a prime draw.

“It was definitely one of the appealing factors to do it because you’re not just there for the experience. You’re there to compete. You’re there to try get Ireland a medal at the Olympics which is certainly one of the main reasons why I did it.”