Franco happy to get that elephant-sized monkey off his back
ZEBRE PARMA 17 GLASGOW 45
Glasgow claimed their first away win in eight months yesterday, leading head coach Franco Smith to joke it felt more like he’d got an elephant off his back rather than a monkey.
The Warriors’ last win away from Scotstoun in any competition was against Newcastle in the Challenge Cup back in April, and they had not won on the road in the URC since a trip to Connacht in January. Having only taken over as head coach in August, Smith was not around for either of those results, which perhaps made him all the happier to have broken his duck with this win at the Stadio Sergio Lanfranchi.
“It feels a little bit like an elephant,” the South African said after seeing his team run in six tries, five of them in the second half.
“It feels like I’ve been a part of this for two years already regarding the away win.
“Obviously that’s important. I think today wasn’t about playing a creative brand or an acceptable brand, it was about winning for us.
“We squeezed it out. We faced a team that was very determined. They must have seen us as an opportunity, because we had a poor record away from home, so they were very well motivated and prepared for us.
“We saw that in the first half, but we managed that pressure, and we had a good reaction in the second half.”
The first half was a grim struggle. After Matt Fagerson was yellow-carded for stopping a maul illegally, Zebre eventually made their advantage count through a Pierre Bruno try after Geronimo Prisciantelli had lobbed a ball out to the right wing.
Prisciantelli added the conversion, but the lead vanished right from the restart when Sintu Manjezi charged down a box kick then flopped over the line for his first try in a Glasgow jersey.
Man-of-the match George Horne converted – he ended up with seven out of seven attempts on goal – and struck again from a penalty with the last kick of the half.
That only put the Warriors three points up, but they took a lot of confidence from going ahead, and two tries early in the second half put them in control of the game.
First Sebastian Cancelliere finished off on the left wing after a powerful break by captain Kyle Steyn, and then Bruno knocked on straight into the arms of Stafford Mcdowall, who raced in from 40 metres.
Any doubt about the outcome of the match vanished when Johnny Matthews got the bonus-point try from close range after good work by Mcdowall, Murphy Walker and Horne.
Zebre’s Jacques du Toit then scored twice from lineout mauls in the closing ten minutes either side of a simple run-in from Warriors substitute Domingo Miotti.
Franco Smith junior came off the bench for the home team in the closing minutes – the first time he had played against a team coached by his dad.
But there was no happy ending for him, as Glasgow had the last word when Matthews scored his own second, also from a maul.
The only real downside of the afternoon for the Warriors was the early hamstring injury to Zander Fagerson which could see the Scotland tighthead sidelined for several weeks.
“We don’t know at this stage how serious it is,” Smith explained.
“But I suppose he’ll be out for a bit, at least.”