Glasgow will drip-feed their returning international players back into the team over the next fortnight to boost their ailing PRO14 campaign – but the frustration remains that they haven’t made the most of their absence, says assistant coach Kenny Murray.
The Warriors’ strong season to reach the Guinness PRO14 final in May was built upon their extraordinary record when the international players were away, securing 19 points out of a possible 20 on the international “windows” during the Six Nations. However from the 20 points available while the World Cup was on, Glasgow have just five points to start their 2019-20 campaign.
“We’ve not got any excuses about guys being away at the World Cup,” said Murray. “We’ve just not performed as well as we’ve needed to in the first four games.
“The guys we had on the pitch at Dragons at the weekend were good enough to win that game, we should have won with the team we had on the park. We had six line breaks in the game but only got on the end of one of them to put any pressure on.”
It means Glasgow have some work to do to get themselves back to the top of the conference they won last year, but they remain confident they’ll pick up the pace.
“It is obviously disappointing to have lost the games we have lost already but we know we can dig ourselves out, there are still a lot of games to play,” added Murray.
“The season doesn’t finish next week but we do need to start winning games. The Dragons is a game we should have won, that is frustrating but now we have the Kings here on Friday and then Zebre away, another two games where if we play to our potential we should be looking to win these games to set up going into Europe.”
The team should get a lift this week with the Southern Kings visiting Scotstoun, and the first batch of players coming back from Japan being fed into the system again/
“Some started training last week even though they weren’t going to be playing at the weekend, and some more are back in training this week,” said Murray. “Out there in training today we had guys like George Horne, Pete Horne, Adam Hastings, George Turner and Zander (Fagerson) and they are all available for selection.
“Then we have a second group of guys who had a lot of game time in the World Cup and they’ll maybe come back in the week after for the Zebre game.
“The guys come back and sometimes it is a bit of a relief to get away from that international pressure, and they are all keen to play and get back into it. Sam Johnson is not available for another week but is back in doing a bit of training to get himself ready.
“They are all disappointed at the outcome in Japan, not getting to the quarter final, but the thing about rugby is that you have to put things behind upon pretty quickly because you have another game in a few days.”
The Kings defeated Glasgow in Port Elizabeth last year in one of the more shocking results of the campaign, and while they’ve lost all four games thus far, the Warriors will not take them lightly.
“We certainly did not play well against them last year,” pointed out Murray. “If you look at their attack stats, they are pretty good.
“They have played some hard teams and scored 10 tries with eight of those 10 coming from lineouts so they are a very strong lineout team. They are just off scpring 30 points against Treviso at the weekend, so this is going to be a really tough game for us.
“We feel our attack can put them under a lot of pressure and they are obviously conceding a lot of points but defensively we are got to have to be at our best because they pose a lot of threats.”