Glasgow Warriors warned: You have achieved nothing yet after big win in Munster

Munster's Paddy Patterson tackles Cole Forbes of Glasgow.

Champions in 2015 and runners-up four years later, Warriors are no strangers to the latter stages of the URC, and with a Challenge Cup quarter-final against Dragons in Scotstoun next Saturday, the Glasgow side are still in the hunt on two fronts.

This victory over Munster was forged in a savage first half and wrapped up when Sione Vailanu scored their fifth try after an hour. Tries from Fraser Brown, Stafford McDowall, Domingo Miotti and Cole Forbes put Smith’s side 28-0 ahead at the interval, but such was their efficiency in attack, their power in defence and set piece domination it was the least they deserved.

Six points ahead of fifth placed Munster, with just ten available points remaining, it looks likely that Warriors will play at home in the play-offs, but Smith knows the bigger battles still have to be fought.

“No, I think there is still a lot to be done. It looks good on the log. I don’t follow the log to be honest I’m not sure. We were fourth and I know that but it’s not our objective.

“Our objective is to be as good as we can be and if it is a home quarter-final, fantastic but for now we just need to be better again next week in certain areas of the game.”

“We didn’t do ourselves favours, we might end up playing Munster again. It was never in our mind to nullify their approach.

“I knew that they were going to throw everything into this game, their last home game of the season and they were just behind us on the log.”

Afterwards Munster coach Graham Rowntree admitted his side had been out muscled by Warriors in the opening half – “That’s not us,” said Rowntree – but the dominance enjoyed by Warriors in contact and at set piece was stark.

Despite welcoming nine Scottish squad members back into his match-day 23, Smith put his side’s dominance down to some solid work during the Six Nations.

“Our set-piece is going to be important going forward. I think everybody, a blind guy would see, we are working on that part of the process and then obviously there were one or two things in attack, breakdown wise, that we didn’t see tonight.

“We will have to go back to the video and see why the process didn’t come so clean in the second part of the game but yes, of course, we have always used that down-time.

“Glasgow is a learning team, it is a team growing, it’s among 52 players, spread among 52 players, we don’t top the high-scoring charts or we don’t top the point scoring players because we interchange so much in what we are doing and again a good squad will make a great team. So there is a lot of learnings even when the internationals are away.”