Highlands deer hunter Mckay trains his sights on Leinster

Josh Mckay took up an opportunity to go deer hunting in the Scottish Highlands during the international break, and now the Glasgow Warriors full-back has a bigger scalp in his sights as he and his team-mates prepare for tomorrow’s trip to Dublin to take on Leinster.

It will be the first meeting between the two sides since Warriors were hammered 76-14 by the Irishmen in last season’s United Rugby Championship play-off quarter-final just over five months ago.

“It was nice to get away in the first week of the break, we had five nights in Paris and then I managed to get up to the Highlands that weekend,” Mckay recalled. “I quite like hunting, so it was good to get some fresh mountain air.

“It was about an hour north of Inverness with a fella I met when we were up that way for pre-season. I did a bit for the local club, Ross Sutherland – coaching with the kids, then watched one of the club games followed by Scotland versus Fiji in the clubhouse – and they jacked the hunt up as well, so it was an awesome weekend.

“The hill was completely different to back home but the hunting itself was essentially very similar,” he added. “We were spot-and-stalk, so you get the binoculars to find them, stalk in on them, then hopefully get the job done.”

The Warriors squad have adopted a similar strategy when preparing for this weekend’s match. Their sights are trained solely on the target ahead and they are not allowing the memory of that defeat in June to put them off the scent.

“You reach the stage where you’ve got to just dump it,” reasoned Mckay. “We’ve got to focus on ourselves and what we can do – not pour that negative energy into stuff that we can’t control.

“We’d come off a tough run of games when we headed there last season, and I think it is a good time to have a crack at them after a couple of weeks of, meaning a lot of the boys will be feeling really fresh.

“They’ve got a lot of depth too, so we respect that, and we know what they are capable of, but, for us, it is about doing all we can to put ourselves in the best place possible to go across there and get the win.”