Dave Rennie targets Pro14 title in first season at Glasgow

Warriors head coach Dave Rennie has told his players they must set their bar at highest possible level. Picture: SNS/SRU.

When asked what he would term as a success in the campaign, which gets under way for the Warriors on Saturday, the Kiwi’s reply was a succinct one. “Winning it,” he said.

The statement is in stark contrast to his counterpart at Edinburgh, Richard Cockerill, who has played down expectations in what is also his first taste of a competition which has been expanded to include South African sides Cheetahs and Southern Kings.

While Cockerill has talked about “under promising and over delivering” and that a bottom-four club has no business in expecting a play-off spot, Rennie is starting from a much stronger base as he inherits a club which has been regular contenders, firstly under Sean Lineen and then current Scotland boss Gregor Townsend who led Glasgow to the Pro12 trophy in 2015.

In the last couple of seasons there has been a drop off, with a semi-final defeat by Connacht – who host Glasgow in Galway on Saturday – and a failure to reach the knockout stages last season.

“It’s a lot about growing the club,” continued the 53-year-old former Waikato Chiefs coach. “Gregor has done a great job and they only  struggled last year when they had a lot of international  players out.

“We have a job to build more depth so we have brought in a handful of guys who can’t play for Scotland in that period.

“In the end we have huge aspirations. I don’t want these boys thinking fourth is good enough. You work hard, try to get to the play-offs, and once there you are two or three weeks from winning a title.

“It’s a long way off but we won’t be talking about anything other than winning the title.

“We want the squad to be better. We want to develop more Scottish internationals and bring good kids through. But if we do all that and finish sixth you can’t call that successful.

“We have to have high aspirations and work hard to achieve them. We have to set the bar high and then work hard to achieve that.

“We will need to tick some boxes along the way. Whether it is realistic or not doesn’t matter, but you don’t have to be the best team in the competition to win it, you just have to be the best team at the end.”

The rugby gods have thrown up a quirky coincidence as Rennie’s first competitive match at the Glasgow helm sees him lock horns with a man who, up until a month or so ago, was one of his  assistants.

Kieran Keane was the Chiefs attack coach and is now the Connacht chief, having replaced Pat Lam, who is now at Bristol.

“He has been around a long time. He’s a smart rugby man,” said Rennie of Keane. “He has a positive mindset about how to play. Pat’s team attacked from everywhere but with KK they’ll kick a lot more from the defensive end. He will have things up his sleeve. Ironic isn’t it that we should be catching up in round one?”

The presence of the South African sides brings another bit of familiarity for a man who has a brilliant record in Super Rugby. Rennie made it clear that he feels the southern hemisphere competition has become a bit convoluted and lopsided with its multi-conference system.

The Guinness Pro14 has now made moves toward that, but the Kiwi is re-assured that the system in place for the coming season is a viable one.

“It’s still better than the competition I have come from,” was his assessment. “You still play everyone, even if it is not everyone twice. The pools look pretty even so you just get on with it, it is as it is.

“We will play a handful of games where we are going to be missing some international players and that is going to be a different challenge for me to coach compared with where I have come from.

“But I knew what I was coming into when I signed the papers.”

Glasgow’s first long-haul trip will be to Bloemfontein in early October to face the Cheetahs. “Super Rugby was a really good format and then they tried to make it more global and so on,” said Rennie.

“Because of that, it has increased the amount of travel and the amount of time away from home so that it has become an unbalanced  competition.

“The New Zealand pool was very tough but the Australian one was not and you have a situation where some South African teams didn’t play the Kiwis at all in the round robin so they could go on to reach the quarter-finals and semi-finals.

“I would imagine the Pro14 group have looked at that and come up with a competition that will avoid that sort of  criticism.”