HUW TURNS BACK THE CLOCK

So Glasgow Warriors sneaked the first leg in the 1872 Cup at Scotstoun last week. It wasn’t a spectacle for the purists up until about 65 minutes when the game kicked into life, with the lead changing hands a number of times.

Glasgow just about shaded it. I thought it would be tight and so it proved.

But a few players showed their class to make the difference. How good is it to see Huw Jones performing somewhere near his best again?

His story has been a strange one over the last two years or so. Who could forget the impact he had on the Calcutta Cup match at Murrayfield in February 2018? Two tries, one from halfway and a break from

that pass from Finn Russell when he just about went the distance of Murrayfield to score, only for Sean Maitland to do the honours.

Jones scored other tries for Scotland in an incredible start to his international career and looked like he would be one of the first names on the team sheet for years to some.

It gave Scotland a cutting edge with real pace and threat, at 10 with Russell, 13 with Jones and 15 with Stuart Hogg.

Three world-class players all playing for Scotland in the same back-line. It was fantasy time for the nation’s supporters and you would never have thought that Jones would not make the World Cup squad just 16 months after that England game.

However, we probably got an inclination that he was not the absolute finished article when he started to play for Glasgow — or not play for Glasgow, as it turned out.

It was very strange because he simply could not replicate his performances in a Scotland jersey when he was playing for Glasgow.

This can happen. Players can peak in certain games and find it hard to back this up in lesser matches.

Mentally, it is tough to try to play just as well as Jones did when he was lighting up Murrayfield in that Calcutta Cup match as opposed to when he is coming up against Zebre on a Friday night in Glasgow.

The key point here is that the best players do