‘You could drive yourself crazy’ - AIL play-offs chase hitting business end for Instonians

It’s all to play for with just three games remaining - Instonians are third five points behind Wesley in the race for the one automatic spot in 1A while their visitors from Limerick sit fifth just three points off the top four.

“You could probably drive yourself crazy looking at the table and fixtures and seeing who's where and what might be,” said Pritchard. “Ultimately, it's going to rely heavily on what we do in the next three games and we obviously can't do anything about what happens in the other games.

“Hopefully, we're still sort of within that top four after three games here but the only thing that we can focus on is our performance and how we prepare...the plan is just to make sure we're in as good a place as we can.”

Instonians’ away form was a concern before the victory at Donnybrook over Wesley.

“The performance was brilliant, obviously, we spoke before the game, just saying that's what we needed to improve from Trinity and if the performance was there, then, you know, hopefully, we'd get the result,” he said. “Luckily, we got the result from it and that's always nice, it’s always pleasing when the result matches the performance.

“I think that's the main thing for us...that we've just got to be able to take that level of performance into the last three here and then see where that leads us at the end of the season.”

Pritchard is expecting the Garryowen game to be won by whichever pack has the upper hand.

“We’re expecting a really tough battle...Garryowen are a really physical team,” he said. “They have been a bit unlucky in some games that I've seen and it's going to be probably the most physical game we'll have this season.

“We've just got to get ourselves ready for that and make sure that we're ready to get stuck into it...I suppose defensively...you've just got to fight fire with fire.

“We've got to focus on getting a bit of pressure on to them and getting double shots in and trying to dominate as many collisions as possible.

“Then, in attack, you just got to make sure that you're playing away from where they're strong and that we move the ball well and I think that's something that we've been very good at in attack.

“Wesley are obviously a very physical team as well...I think that Garryowen will be a step up from that physically and they're not sort of apologetic about it.

"They're very happy to take plays off nine and off 10 hard runners.

“For us, we're not trying to change our approach too much...we'll try and make sure we're in as good a shape as possible to counter their strengths and to exploit their weaknesses.”

Robert Whitten comes into the second row while Kian Mullholland replaces the injured Mark Lee in the backrow.

Hugo Ellerby will miss the rest of the season but former Ulster and Ireland winger Craig Gilroy starts.