‘Warriors will have to be at their best to halt Munster’
McFarland says forwards must front up if they’re to keep European bid on track
HE new stands are up at Myreside, Edinburgh trained there for the first time yesterday, and there is a palpable excitement within the squad as they look forward to their opening match at their new home, against Timisoara Saracens a week today. Before they train at the ground again, however, Duncan Hodge’s team will have played in a match 400 miles away that could go a long way to determining how successful their move will be.
Harlequins are the opposition tomorrow, the Challenge Cup the competition. The prize for the winners: almost certainly a place in the last eight.
Having beaten Timisoara in Romania with an under-strength team earlier in the pool stages, Edinburgh will have to suffer an extraordinary lapse if they are to fail to win the return match. They can win both their remaining games yet fail to win the group, but their points tally will then be enough for them to go through as one of the three best runners-up from the five groups.
In other words, that prize is tantalisingly close to their grasp, but first will come what should be a fierce, no-holds-barred contest at The Stoop. When the teams met at Murrayfield back in October it was certainly a lively affair, with the home side winning 36-35.
Duncan Weir, who was on his way back from injury at the time, was involved only as a water-carrier. Yesterday, after that initial training outing at Myreside, the stand-off admitted to being unsure whether the rematch will be quite so breathless an affair, though he did suggest that, ideally, his own team would be able to impose a bit more shape on proceedings.
“I’ll answer that at 80 minutes,” he said when asked if a second try-fest was in the offing, the first match having produced 11 touchdowns. “I don’t know.
“I remember watching from the touchline and, at just 20 minutes in, both teams were absolutely gone: they were gubbed. Both teams were playing a lot of turnover ball and there wasn’t a lot of set-pieces to slow things down.
“Hopefully the lungs won’t be as broken up as in the first game. We’re all refreshed after having last weekend off and, hopefully, we can have a bit more structure in the game.
“This game is huge for us and they’ll be targeting it the exact same way. If they win then they’re half a step closer to getting into that last eight.
“I know we’re really focused on doing the simple things well, which will tie in to putting them under pressure. We can only concentrate on the things we can control in the game and not worry about trying to run the length of the field on every occasion.
“It’s massive. If we can go down there and get a victory it’s almost half a step into the quarter-final, which would be great for Scottish rugby and Edinburgh. It’s a huge game. If we win LASGOW Warriors are on their best run of the season so far, having won their last five games, and, in doing so, they have displayed a versatility that was beyond them not too long ago.
While their biggest scores still see them turn to strike runners such as Stuart Hogg and Tommy Seymour, they are now just as capable of winning tighter games by meeting fire with fire up front.
The enhanced power of the Warriors pack was most in evidence in the home Champions Cup match against Racing 92, when the Parisians, a week after being humiliated at home, fielded one of the heaviest groups of forwards ever selected.
The aim was clear: to steamroller Glasgow off the pitch in the bluntest, most uncompromising way possible.
It did not work. Racing’s rolling maul was rebuffed, and the Warriors played at a tempo that left their opponents gasping for breath on Scotstoun’s artificial surface.
The three subsequent wins in the Pro 12, against Edinburgh, Treviso and Cardiff, have enhanced the feeling the team are now playing close to a level that can take them, at last, to the European quarter-finals.
And yet, despite all the virtues shown in that five-game winning streak, assistant coach Dan McFarland has rightly warned that the Warriors will need to improve again if they are to make it six wins on the bounce when they meet Munster tomorrow evening.
The Irish province has already beaten the Warriors twice this season – in the Champions Cup in their first game after the sudden death of their coach Anthony Foley, and then in the league just a few weeks ago.
With a three-point lead over Glasgow in Champions Cup pool one, Munster will take a huge step towards the quarter-finals if they win at Scotstoun, and McFarland thinks the home forwards in particular will have to be on top of their game if they are going to stop that.
“We have to front up,” he said. “We have to bring our A game. And we will have to be better than last week.
“The lads did well last week, but we’re now going up to another level playing Champions Cup rugby. Munster bring a very specific gameplan which they execute extremely well, right up there with the best, whether it is in their forward play, their defence, their kicking game. that we’re bringing our first game to Myreside with a real purpose to go out and do a job and get into the last eight, which would be great.”
Hodge, the acting head coach, must have played around 100 times at Myreside for Watsonians and Edinburgh as well as in the odd representative fixture, but players such as Weir have minimal experience of their new home. Nonetheless, they all appear certain that the move will be beneficial for the team.
“We had our first training session out there today,” Weir added. “I’ve only played once here, for Hawks, but that was a good day so I have positive memories of Myreside. Hopefully it will be more hostile for the opposition coming here.
“It will be a good change for the club and, if we can pack this out every week, it can only drive the club forward. For the club to develop it had to take the leap outside Murrayfield.”
At 25, Weir has a good few years in which to add to his 25 caps, and we will learn on Wednesday whether he has done enough since returning from injury to persuade Scotland coach Vern Cotter to include him in his squad for the Six Nations Championship. But the stand-off insisted that he was concentrating on his club form rather than daydreaming about international duty and that he had been unaware Cotter was due to announce his squad next week.
“I’m just looking to be positive, enjoy my rugby, play with a smile on my face. International honours will take care of themselves – I’m not going to be worried about that.”