Tommy wants Warriors to be in the pink
Scotstoun victory vital to Glasgow’s Euro Cup chances
TOMMY Seymour is chuffed to be in the pink again – but knows the health of Glasgow Warriors’ European Champions Cup campaign is in the balance.
The winger is proud to be among the rugby players who are wearing the garish boots to help promote breast cancer awareness, and is equally aware that tomorrow’s clash at Scotstoun with Leinster is one they have to win to have any chance of reaching the knockout stages of Europe’s top tournament.
“I don’t think that’s unfair, I don’t think that is too big a statement, to be quite honest. Everyone – media, players, coaches –agree that home games are vitally important,” said Seymour.
“Add in that we haven’t managed to win in round one as well.
“People talk about the group stages being as close to knock-out as you can get in a group scenario and that’s the way it is.
“This game has real significance and we are not going to shy away from that.
“It’s a close to a must-win as you can get. We have an incredibly strong pool, that’s pretty obvious, so you can’t allow margins to get too big between teams and certainly we will be looking to carry on the home form from earlier in the year.”
Having lost their seasonlong unbeaten record to English champions Exeter Chiefs last weekend while Leinster were beating Montpellier – both sides securing bonus points in that match – Glasgow will be cut adrift if they lose tomorrow since they would be at least eight points behind Leinster. I think every team starts with the idea that they want to win it.
“You can look at pools and think there is potential for two to get out of that [but] with the strength of our pool you could argue that maybe only one team is going to creep out of there,” said Seymour.
“It doesn’t change our mindset, we still want to win the pool.”
The wing also knows the importance of bonus points but says the priority must be the win.
“If you look at the weekend, Exeter managed to stop us from getting one, so bonus points are obviously huge.
“But for us, the mentality has to be to get the win first,” he admitted.
“Assuming we’re winning it would be delightful to stop them getting anything out of the game … if they got a bonus point it wouldn’t be the perfect scenario, but it would certainly be a very good one.
“The belief hasn’t dropped off. We don’t want to get too negative. We won six out of seven, we won all our league games and Europe is incredibly different to the league,” he said.
“We didn’t really click at the weekend and that isn’t taking anything away from Exeter. They had a great game plan, they executed it brilliantly and it was a wet night.
“But we didn’t click well and we left a few things out on the park. There are definitely things we can fix.
“We’ve got full belief that coming back to Scotstoun in front of our fans, we can go out there and get a win.”