Dominant Glasgow survive late Sale rally
The only place this Champions Cup encounter was close was on the scoreboard. For an hour, and particularly during a one-sided first half in which the Warriors took a 13-0 lead, Glasgow won the scrums, the line-outs, the collisions, the tactical battle, the breakdown and the penalty count. They dominated possession and hogged territory against a Sale side who said they had come for a battle, but barely fired a shot until this game was almost beyond them.
Although this was a million miles from a perfect performance from Dave Rennie’s vastly experienced side, for most of this match Glasgow displayed a defensive discipline, patience and iron control which meant the result was never in serious doubt despite Sale’s late rally. It is, however, a huge concern that despite Glasgow’s tight five, led from the front by the wonderfully combative Zander Fagerson, totally bossing this game, they never came close to a try bonus point. Equally, Sale should never have collected the losing bonus point they gained through a try on one of their rare attacks.
That Glasgow should have scored more points is beyond doubt, and had man-of-the-match Adam Hastings not missed a first-half penalty and dropped goal, or had Hastings’s delicate chip bounced more favourably for DTH van der Merwe, Glasgow’s margin of victory would have been more emphatic.
As it was, a couple of early Hastings penalties, and a superbly taken Van der Merwe try just before the interval gave the Warriors a 13-0 half-time lead that they were never to relinquish against a surprisingly lacklustre Sale side missing the quartet of Sharks – Tom Curry, Mark Wilson, Faf de Klerk and Lood de Jager – who played in the World Cup final.
Sale pride themselves on their defensive obduracy but Rennie accepted that if Glasgow displayed a similar lack of ruthlessness against Exeter next week, then it could be a long afternoon.
Taking control: DTH van der Merwe bursts through to score for Glasgow Warriors
“When you get into these arm wrestles you need to put them away and we didn’t, which made for an uncomfortable final 10 minutes,” said Rennie. “Today showed we’ve got a set-piece that will be competitive down at Exeter, and I also thought we defended well for big chunks of this game. But we’ll need to play smarter and improve the quality of our kicking. We were choosing the right option a lot of the time, but it just wasn’t implemented well enough. We’ll need to be better there.”
Despite a welter of possession, Glasgow struggled to carve out many clear chances, although their opening try after 35 minutes was a carefully crafted gem. George Horne was the catalyst, the little scrum-half working the blindside from a ruck 10 metres into Sale’s half.
When he fed Sam Johnson, the visitors still looked in a good position, but the inside centre pivoted and offloaded a disguised pop pass to Van der Merwe. The wing’s pace and running line saw him cut inside Marland Yarde, and although he still had a lot to do, he effortplayers lessly arced around full-back Simon Hammersley. When Hastings’s conversion went over, the Warriors had increased their lead to 13 points without the Sharks gaining a foothold.
For the first hour, Sale had been notable only for their tenacity, with Scotland wing Byron McGuigan only getting his hands on the ball once in his first 60 minutes at Scotstoun since leaving eight years ago. However, with 20 minutes remaining Sale sparked into life, attacking from deep and muscling their way down to the Warriors line, with flanker JeanLuc de Preez’s charges and slick offloading generating vital forward momentum.
From nowhere, Sale were back in the game as replacement loosehead prop Coenie Oosthuizen carried two defenders over the line after what looked like a forward pass from scrum-half Embrose Papier. AJ MacGinty’s conversion brought Sale back to within a converted try of an unlikely win.
Despite a late charge with Sale camped in Glasgow’s 22 after they kicked to the corner and tried to maul their way over, it was too little too late.
Sharks director of rugby Steve Diamond was the first to concede that a win for the visitors would have been in defiance of sporting justice, and that a losing bonus point represented a good return, given how overpowered his side had been for most of this game.
“We weathered the storm in the first half, and if we’d gone in at just 6-0 down, with our bench, I thought we might have been able to challenge a bit more, but it wasn’t to be,” said Diamond.
“We just couldn’t get a foothold anywhere in the game and at 13-0 I thought we were about to fall off the edge of a cliff. But we managed to salvage it and make it competitive again, and I thought that it was probably a pretty fair result.”