Montpellier won’t “mail in” their performance at Scotstoun on Sunday if new coach Jake White has anything to do with it, believes Glasgow Warriors prop Jerry Yanuyanutawa.
The Fijian who grew up in Australia played for White in the Super Rugby franchise the Brumbies and expects the man who led South Africa to the 2007 World Cup to produce maximum effort from the French club.
Montpellier are the only club in the pool who cannot qualify for the quarter-finals with two games left but Yanuyanutawa believes the usual French custom of fielding understrength sides or giving less than 100 per cent in such circumstances is unlikely to be follow under White, who replaced Fabien Galthie as head coach of the French team over the festive period.
“Jake is a very calculating coach, very smart, always a forward planner,” said the prop, who grew up in Australia. “He won’t have that French mentality, he will be wanting to come here to get a victory.
“He has a big reputation and he likes the pressure, it’s what he thrives on. Jake is good at finding motivations for players and I wouldn’t be surprised if he finds something to get the French boys up.
“I know everyone will probably be talking them down, thinking that they’ll just throw this game away, but knowing Jake White he’s not that kind of coach. He’s not someone who will take things lying down.”
Yanuyanutawa was only with White for a year before coming to the Warriors but was impressed by his abilities.
“Jake took over the Brumbies the year I was there and brought through a young group,” he continued. “Everyone thought that we would finish bottom of the table, but we ended up finishing in the middle.
“The year after, they played in the final, and that’s all due to Jake White bringing players through. When he came there were just two Wallabies in the squad, but by the time he left there were 17, that’s a testament to what he can do.
“He makes a group believe in themselves. He also likes talking up the opposition, which I think he will try and do this weekend, it’s like a Muhammad Ali’s rope-a-dope.
“There’s no way we want to be underestimating them. We are going in focused on the job we need to do.”
Glasgow are in the tricky position of knowing they need to win both their remaining pool games Sunday against Montpellier and away at Bath the following week if they are to progress, but also knowing that they probably need a bonus point top-up to those wins as well.
“Winning is obviously the first goal, and whatever comes after that is a plus,” said Yanuyanutawa. “The bonus point could be a pitfall. We don’t want to underestimate Montpellier and I f you assume things then you will definitely fail. For us, it is about getting the win and then pushing on to the next week.”
Jerry has been battling through some tough conditions of late, playing in the gale-force winds of the Scarlets win on Friday nioght and then playing in snow for the first time in his career in the A team game against Scotland U-20 on Tuesday.
“That was a new experience, but it was fine,” he said. “I think the French will be dreading bad weather more than us. But that won’t be an excuse for us because we’ve got a job to do whatever the conditions.”
Mwanwhile Gregor Townsend confirmed that Mark Bennett could be involved in the team announced today to take on the French.
The 21-year-old has been out since suffering a knee injury against the All Blacks in the Autumn Tests but is now “in the mix” according to the head coach.
“Mark has trained fully for two weeks and we had always him pencilled in a back-up game for the beginning of this week,” he said.
“It’s great that he cleared all the hurdles to get to that game and even better that he came through looking good, backing it up by training again after it without reaction.
“We have a lot of competition in the backline but Mark was in excellent form going into the November Tests. In the last Montpellier game he was one of our best players on the field that day and he had a couple of excellent breaks.”