Glasgow will be without Scotland scrum-half Henry Pyrgos until March but recall several of their World Cup legion to arms against struggling Ospreys at Scotstoun tomorrow in the PRO12.
Peter Horne, Richie Vernon, Tommy Seymour, Ryan Wilson and Gordon Reid will all return to action from the Scotland squad while Fijian favourite Leone Nakarawa is back and new Tongan tight head Sila Puafisi will make his debut for the club.
However the blow is that Pyrgos exacerbated a wrist injury whilst at the World Cup which required surgery and will be out for four months. He was not included in the Glasgow European Rugby Champions Cup squad announced yesterday.
The back-up to skipper Greig Laidlaw for Scotland missed the entire Six Nations with injury earlier this year but returned to some sparkling form with the warriors during the PRO12 championship run-in and in the warm-up matches for Scotland prior to England 2015. Hooker Fraser Brown, another who enjoyed a good tournament, will be out for eight weeks after undergoing foot surgery.
While missing the two injured players and still resting Mark Bennett, Jonny Gray, Stuart Hogg, Finn Russell and Josh Strauss, head coach Gregor Townsend is able to call on 14 more who were missing at the World Cup for the visit of the Ospreys, usually a perennial play-off team but third from bottom with only one win from their opening five games.
“It is a very big challenge for us,” said Townsend. “I have been hearing comments from Wales during the week talking about this being a ‘must-win’ game for them. I believe all the Welsh international players will be back, the likes of Alun Wyn Jones, Scott Baldwin, Dan Lydiate, Dan Biggar and they are quality players, British Lions.”
The champions are hardly where they’d like to be either lying in seventh with three defeats already, although they’ve picked up points in every game.
“It would be great to win all your games, and we would certainly have liked to have won those games we lost narrowly,” added Townsend. “But we are only just outside the top four and that goal for every team is to get into the top four, then the top two and win the semi final. We know we will have to win most of our games to do that.
“We were not happy as a group with some aspects of our performance in Leinster last week but there were other aspects we did well. We know we will have to play well for 80 minutes and we are going to have to work hard to reintegrate players coming back.
“Some players have not had any coaching time at all with our new forwards coach Dan McFarland and have been with Scotland from May to November. Some things they will pick up easily the way we want to play rugby but it is a time for real yard work from both players and coaches to make sure we are in the right place to be able to win games.”
Glasgow team (vs Ospreys, Guinness PRO12, Scotstoun, ko 2.30 pm)
T Seymour; L Jones, R Vernon, P Horne, S Lamont; D Weir, M Blair; G Reid, P MacArthur, S Puafisi; G Peterson, L Nakarawa; R Harley (capt), S Favaro, R Wilson.
Replacements: J Malcolm, A Allan, Z Fagerson, S Cummings, C Fusaro, A Price, S Johnson, T Naiyaravoro.