Not To Be In Belfast

Glasgow Warriors have been crowned the 2014/15 Guinness PRO12 champions after Munster endured a comprehensive 13-31 defeat to the Scotsmen at Belfast’s Kingspan Stadium. Game overview and thoughts of Head Coach Anthony Foley here.

An emphatic performance from Warriors coupled with an error-strewn outing for Munster saw the Scottish outfit run in four tries as opposed to one for Munster.

Much of the damage was done early on when excellent offloading and interchanging between Glasgow backs and forwards saw Robert Harley and DHT van der Merwe run in early tries – Leone Nakarawa proving a serious thorn in Munster’s side all game, but especially so in the opening 40.

A Stuart Hogg break, off of which Henry Pyrgos ran in Warriors’ third try, made it 21-3 before Andrew Smith eventually crossed for Munster just the break. Ian Keatley added the conversion to his earlier penalty to make it 10-21 at the interval.

A strong start to the second 40 saw Munster make it 13-21 after good work at scrum time won them a penalty on 48 minutes but that would be Munster’s final score.

Chance after chance went a begging as a fortified Warriors defence constantly forced the knock on from Munster who themselves were far from clinical.

The impressive Finn Russell gave Munster a mountain to climb when he crossed and converted (his fourth conversion of the match) his own try on 59 minutes and the final killer blow for Munster was replacement Duncan Weir’s penalty on 73 minutes after Warriors began to get the measure of the Munster scrum which, up until then, had been the more dominant of the two.

13-31 the final score and Glasgow Warriors run out deserved winners on the day.

Full match report to follow.

Speaking after the game Head Coach Anthony Foley commented, “Tonight Glasgow were everything that we thought they were capable of and if you give them time and allow them into the open space with their big players, they will make the offloads and get into the open channels. Warriors’ support play and offloading was excellent today, we saw it in abundance, especially in the first half and we’re sorry that we couldn’t control it better. We had prepared for it but failed on that front today.

“Nor did we control the kick side of the game, allowing them easy possession in our own half and we got turned over way too often at the breakdown. Also in the second half we tried to play from too deep.

“It’s hard to take but a lot of us have been through this situation before and it’s about understanding it, learning from it and making sure we keep going forward. It’s a relatively young side, we’ll obviously lose a few guys but hopefully we can get back into this situation again next year. With the way the league is now run it’s hard enough to get into the top 4, never mind make it to the final, so it’s about maintaining what we’re doing and building on it.”

“We have a good squad, we need to learn from this and come back stronger.”