Rennie relishes bonus point as Glasgow home in on knockouts

Dave Rennie’s Glasgow side scored five tries in a fully deserved bonus-point victory in France as Adam Ashe crossed for a brace of tries and scrum-half George Horne produced a man-of-thematch display.

Ashe (two), Horne, Stuart Hogg and Huw Jones did the damage for the Warriors as Adam Hastings finished with 17 points. Lyon’s tries came from Toby Arnold, Noa Nakaitaci and Charl McLeod.

“We’re not going to look too far ahead. What we know is if we get it right next week [against Lyon] we’ll put ourselves in a strong position heading into the last couple of rounds in January, starting with Cardiff at home,” head coach Rennie said. “We’re desperate to still be in the mix come the knock-outs and we’ve got some tough games coming up.

“There is not an awful lot between a lot of our boys and we want to reward performance and give opportunities.”

Glasgow went to the break 20-10 up as Horne created Ashe’s first and also scored a try of his own with the excellent Hastings kicking the points.

Lyon responded through Arnold’s easy finish in the corner and the boot of Jonathan Pelissie.

In the second half, Nakaitaci and McLeod grabbed Lyon tries, but it never looked like being enough as Hogg, replacement Jones and Ashe’s second took Glasgow home.

Hogg’s was the crucial score when he got downward pressure on a Peter Horne kick after McLeod failed to gather. Jones then scored with his first touch which meant a late yellow card for Tim Swinson mattered little.

“We’re rapt for Adam, he got a couple of dot downs, but it was all the other work he did defensively, carrying creative forward and so on,” said Rennie. “He was a big contributor today.

“We were disappointed to go down to 14 when Tim saw yellow. We’ve played with 14 recently and we know how to maintain ball in those situations and I thought the boys controlled that period pretty well.

“We only gave away six penalties last week, and in the last few weeks we’ve kept the count to single figures. We kicked away too much ball giving them a lot of opportunities to attack us. It’s something for us to look at and be better at next week.”