Glasgow Warriors' Monday message may be 'cringey' but they are getting job done

This clichéd game of two halves might just have been the perfect preparation for Glasgow, taking confidence from a dominant second period while learning the lessons from a sloppy first in their 35-17 win at Scarlets that booked their place in the Challenge Cup final against Toulon.

Glasgow Warriors' George Horne kicks the ball during the ECPR European Challenge Cup semi-final match at the Parc y Scarlets, Llanelli.

Player of the match Jack Dempsey believes the Warriors can use their patchy first-half performance to prepare them for the big games which are now coming thick and fast. They appeared to get the big occasion nerves as the Scarlets went into half-time ahead, but Dempsey’s Glasgow pulled themselves together and will look to repeat that second half showing when Munster come for the BKT URC quarter-final this weekend.

“I definitely think the crowd got to us in the first half,” admitted the No 8. “There are a lot of guys who have not played at that stage before and I think it got to them a bit, but the silver lining is that you get it out of the system now so it does not hit you next week against Munster or the week after or the week after that in a final. I think the second half showed what we are made of, our character. We could easily have folded, gone into our shell, blamed it on a learning experience and looked to next year. But we dug deep and went back to what makes us a great team and pulled it out in the end.”

Glasgow will have the chance to become the first Scottish team to lift a European Trophy when they travel to Dublin in three weeks, but before that they will look to get through the league quarter-final against a Munster team they beat away from home just over a month ago. All of which means coach Franco Smith will make sure they park the celebrations after the win in Llanelli. “We will put it aside for now and move on to the league,” said Dempsey. “Every week when we beat Zebre, or we beat Ulster or whoever, Franco comes in on Monday, we all stand up and give each other a round of applause and he goes ‘right, next job.’ You laugh at the start and it gets a bit cringey or whatever, but the message is there that you don’t win anything until you have won something. That is what we have bought into, we celebrate the wins, we have a beer in the changing room now and then onto the next job Monday, that is the mentality.

“To get that result in a pretty hostile environment just adds another layer to the story. I have played here before but it was not anything like this, where you cannot hear the lineout calls for example. So momentum is definitely more of a mental thing, you take confidence in not having lost for a while but today was a bit of a shock to the system, a wake-up call to the boys, in big moments this is what it takes and it can slip through your fingers. I think the loss against us at Thomond Park was a wake up call for Munster, they bounced back really hard. Now they are coming off a rest week so two weeks to prep for us and we have five days so it will be a tough one.”