‘We need to be more clinical’, says Rennie ahead of Lyon tests
Glasgow Warriors head coach Dave Rennie is a hard man to please. The no-nonsense New Zealander admitted to being satisfied with his team’s performance against Cardiff Blues yesterday, but was hardly bursting with pride.
“I think we left a few out there,” was his assessment of his team’s 12-29 victory. “It was an excellent start with 12 points in four or five minutes, so that set the tone a little bit.
“But I guess we are always looking for perfection, so we need to be a bit more clinical and we probably didn’t use the wind that well in the first half.
0 Adam Hastings: Man of match.
In the end, we defended really well – we had a big chunk of the game without the ball.”
“It was a pretty good performance either side of the ball,” he added. “You’ve got to convert [opportunities into points] and last week we converted none out of five, so this was an important step.
“We now have to play Lyon two weeks in a row and we have to get results in both those games to stay in the hunt but we’re happy to come here and grab the five points.
“The last two weeks, defensively, have been a massive step up for us compared to what we’ve done in Pro14. We talked a lot during the week about this being the new normal – we need to bring this sort of intensity each week. We know we’ve got a pretty good skill-set and we know we can hurt teams with ball in hand, but we’ve got to be really brutal without it.”
Stand-off Adam Hastings was named man-of-the-match after a virtuoso performance, but Rennie was clearly keen to keep a lid on the soaring expectations surrounding the 22-year-old.
“We’re really happy with Adam but he’s got a long way to go,” said the coach. “He’s confident, he works hard, he’s got a good skill-set and he’s going to learn a lot – he’s a kid.
“European competition is a bit different from Pro14, sometimes you need to build pressure by going through more phases and he’ll get more of an understanding of the patience required to ask questions of teams. It probably wasn’t a great day for his punting and so on, but he was very good with ball-in-hand.”