Glasgow coach Jason O’Halloran: Injuries can sometimes be a blessing

It is unrealistic for a team to expect to go through a full season without a few bumps in the road, and Glasgow Warriors were knocked off target towards the end of December and into January when they lost four games out of five, with a growing cast of injured players adding to the feeling that the Scotstoun outfit had suddenly become pretty vulnerable after a rampant start to the campaign.

Glasgow Warriors assistant coach, Jason OHalloran. Picture: SNS

However, after seeing the side grind out a 9-3 victory in appalling conditions against Ospreys towards the end of last month, followed by high-scoring wins over Cardiff Blues away and Connacht at home in the two games played during February, assistant coach Jason O’Halloran, pictured, reckons that things are beginning to come back together at just the right time as we approach the business end of the campaign. The New Zealander – who is responsible for masterminding Glasgow’s attack – was particularly encouraged by the way his charges went about dismantling Connacht on Friday night.

“It was another opportunity for our young guys to put their hands up while the international guys were away on Six Nations duty and they grabbed it,” he said. “I thought the energy and enthusiasm was fantastic. Looking at the numbers in support of line-breaks is always a good indicator of the mentality of the group, and every time we broke we got three or four jerseys there really quick, so that was really impressive from my point of view.

“We’ve scored a lot of points during this Six Nations window, we’ve won our last three games with a young group and picked up 14 out of 15 points,” he added. “We’d like to finish the job [against Zebre] this Saturday but having lost over there to Benetton earlier in the season we know that the Italian sides can be tough nuts to crack these days.”

The really good news for Warriors is that their injury problems are also easing, with Matt Fagerson, George Horne, George Turner and Chis Fusaro among the key players who came back in to bolster the team last weekend. There are still a fair few big-hitters such as Callum Gibbins, DTH van der Merwe and Lee Jones missing, but O’Halloran insisted that he is fairly comfortable with that. “I couldn’t tell you about time-frames [for players returning from injury] or anything like that, but what I do know from experience is that often it is not a bad thing to have injuries because you then have guys at the back end of the season who are energised and really looking forward to playing rugby,” he reasoned.

“Sometimes, if you play a full season, you can get towards the end, when you really need to be at your peak, but be quite worn out. So, injuries can be a blessing.”