What a difference year makes for Glasgow Warriors as Josh McKay outlines one significant 'positive'

This time last year, Glasgow Warriors were going into the new season seriously under-prepared. They had only had one friendly outing, against the semi-pro Ayrshire Bulls, and new coach Franco Smith had barely had time to get his feet under the table and his head round the various demands of the job. The consequence was an inconsistent set of performances for the first two or three months, with a first away win not coming until December.

Josh McKay scores a try during a match last season for Glasgow Warriors.

They had only had one friendly outing, against the semi-pro Ayrshire Bulls, and new coach Franco Smith had barely had time to get his feet under the table and his head round the various demands of the job. The consequence was an inconsistent set of performances for the first two or three months, with a first away win not coming until December .

Twelve months on, as they prepare to kick off the new United Rugby Championship campaign with a home game against Leinster on Sunday afternoon, Josh McKay, for one, is convinced they are in a far better state. Out since March with a broken foot, the full-back returned to the team in the recent friendly against Ulster, and believes that he and his team-mates are now more than ready for the competitive action to begin.

“The biggest positive has been that now we’ve had that growth under Franco over last season,” the 26-year-old said. “He came into pre-season late, so it took us a while to find our feet last season, whereas now we know how we want to play. When we came in this pre-season, there wasn’t as much fine tuning needed to be done. Everyone knows the skeleton of how we want to play, how we want to defend, how we want to attack and move the ball.”

McKay’s team will be favourites to win, having selected a squad that includes no fewer than seven members of Scotland’s World Cup squad – forwards Zander Fagerson, Scott Cummings, Rory Darge and Johnny Matthews, and backs Huw Jones, Kyle Steyn and George Horne, who will be making his 100th appearance for the team if he comes off the bench. But Leinster finished the regular season on top of the URC, and have greater depth than any other team in the competition, so although they will be without their international contingent, McKay is taking nothing for granted.

“I’d say Leinster are at a stage now where it doesn’t really matter who steps out of the starting line-up – the next man who steps in knows the job he’s got to do,” McKay said. “They’re well drilled. We’ve got a lot of respect for the fact that they’ve built a big squad and those boys can step in and step up.”

After hitting a rich vein of form around the turn of the year, the Warriors went on to reach the Challenge Cup final and the URC quarter-finals. They felt they had failed to do themselves justice in their defeats by Toulon and Munster respectively in those games, yet while the season as a whole may have ended in double disappointment, in retrospect it was one in which substantial progress was made.

That progress, along with the solid preparation work they have been able to put in, will mean there is a greater burden of expectation for the Warriors to shoulder this time round. It is a burden that McKay is more than willing to shoulder. “You want to win, don’t you?,” he added. “With winning is going to come that pressure. There could be teams chasing us, whereas in the past we were chasing them. People are going to be nipping at your heels as opposed to us going at them.”