Nakarawa to return as Wilson shuffles the deck
LEONE Nakarawa will fly back into Scotland this week and resume training shortly, according to Danny Wilson. The Glasgow coach said last week that Nakarawa would not be involved in either game against Edinburgh, and admitted he was not sure when precisely the Fijian forward would return from an extended paternity leave. Yesterday, however, Wilson sounded a lot more confident.
“He will be back this week,” he said of Nakarawa, who began his second spell as a Glasgow player on a shortterm deal at the start of the year but has since agreed to stay on for the coming season. “He’s on a flight this week. Then we’ll have to go through the normal process as you do with anyone flying back into the country. Hopefully it won’t be long before we get him on the training ground.”
Having finally had their PRO14 play-offs ended by Saturday’s 30-15 loss to Edinburgh, the Warriors will not have another game between Friday night’s Murrayfield return and the beginning of the new season on the first weekend in October. Wilson will make some changes in order to see some more squad members in competitive action before the 2020/21 campaign, but he is disinclined to regard the derby as a glorified trial match.
“I think it will be a balance,” he said of his selection plans. “We’re aware now that we don’t have another game after this for four weeks. We probably need to think about combinations of players that may well lead into that first league game and players who will be available for us.
“A lot of players will be available for that first block, but then we will lose them for long periods of time [because of international duty].”
One combination of particular importance is the back row, where both Tom Gordon and Matt Fagerson will again be involved, according to the coach. Fagerson began in the unfamiliar position of openside, Gordon’s speciality, on Saturday, while Gordon came off the bench.
“There are definitely a few changes we will make,” Wilson continued. “We won’t make massive, wholesale, complete changes, but we will make enough that it will be noticeable. We do want to look at a couple of people.
“There are maybe one or two we would have looked at who maybe aren’t quite ready, returning from injuries or niggles. I’m talking in riddles a bit because I don’t want to give everything away, but you’ll see that.
“The reality is we want to win a derby: we just lost one on the weekend and no-one likes losing two derbies. It’s important for us to go with the mindset to win and perform well. We’ve got one eye now on preparing for the league and this could be the last opposition we have prior to the league, so there’s a few things we will look at there.
“Between the games we’ll have had a look at enough people, as you’ll see when we come to selection, to make genuine decisions around the first league match. We have a couple of young boys we’ll look to expose maybe not quite now but later – the plan is definitely to do that.
“You don’t want to come off two losses regardless of what they are, whether they’re your first hit out or dead rubbers. You want to win your last game before you go into the next league. There’s an experimental part of it, but there’s a pride part too.”
This is far from a normal year, of course, and while teams would usually have a couple of friendlies to help prepare for the coming season, Wilson is still unsure whether that will be possible this time round. “We’ll do an internal hit-out, definitely,” he said. “With the Covid situation we’re not sure what we can or can’t do with travel for non-essential matches; likewise there are teams who aren’t playing and aren’t ready to play, so who that opposition would be is the difficulty at the moment.”