SATURDAY’s match against Connacht is not a must-win for Glasgow Warriors. Not officially, anyway: they have already qualified for the PRO12 semi-finals, and will finish no lower than third even if they lose this last game of the regular season.

But, having built up considerable momentum with nine consecutive victories, the champions are in no mood to slacken off now. Besides, for all that they are through to the last four, only by winning in the west of Ireland can they guarantee a last-four tie at Scotstoun.

“We have to focus on winning, so it is pretty much a knockout game,” Josh Strauss, the back-row forward, said yesterday. “Finish the season on a high and it’s a great morale and confidence boost when you do finish in top spot.

“That’s what we’re aiming for. You want to win every game you play in. We do know that’s important - but it’s also important to focus on it just being another game, and not to put too much importance on it.”

This is a lesson that the squad, and the coaching team too, learned when they lost the 2014 final. Get too caught up in the occasion and you fail to do yourself justice on the pitch. Stay grounded and apply yourself meticulously but not manically to the task in hand - as they did in last year’s final - and you give yourself the best possible chance of playing to your potential.

The Connacht match, then, is just another game in the sense that it will be no more than another step along the road to Murrayfield, where the final will take place on 28 May. Just another game, too, in the same way that the nine previous matches also did no more than help the Warriors progress towards that goal - and yet Strauss and his team-mates applied themselves with fearsome intensity to those matches.

Of course the big aim for Glasgow is to stretch that winning run to 12 matches and reclaim the trophy they won so convincingly last season. “I suppose it is 12 in a row we’re aiming for,” Strauss added. “Every season you put on a goal, but it’s an unspoken thing that you play in a pro competition because you want to win it - you’re here because you’re competitive.”

There was a time just a couple of months ago when the Warriors were down in eighth place and it looked like their hopes of holding on to the trophy were fading, but Strauss explained that they had never panicked. They had several games in hand, so could tell themselves they were in a false position, but more importantly they were able to spend more time together as an entire squad, whereas during the Rugby World Cup 21 of them had been away from Scotstoun on international duty.

“Mid-season we managed to turn it around a bit, but that also came down to it being a different sort of year with the World Cup and everything,” he acknowledged. “When things aren’t going as planned there’s always talk and you have a chat about it, but it wasn’t panic stations or anything like that. We had a chat about it, but that’s been a good thing in my time here: we sit down as a team. We have different groups, including a leaders’ group, and we talk about it and work it out like grown men.”

Perhaps the most relevant talk came in the wake of the 13-10 defeat by Ulster, when the players agreed they had had enough of losing and that it was time to start the long climb back to the top. Such resolutions are easy to make and altogether harder to implement, of course, but the Warriors have stayed true to their word.

They beat Munster and the Dragons by three points in each of their next two games, then Cardiff by seven, Leinster by six and Ulster by ten. Their last four games have been by increasingly wider margins - 22 in Treviso, 29 in Parma against Zebre, 36 in Llanelli against the Scarlets, then, last Friday at Scotstoun, they ran up a record score against Zebre again, humbling the Italians 70-10.

“That played a part in the turning point all right,” Strauss said of that collective chat after the Ulster loss. “We knew coming into the latter end of the season what we had to get to the play-offs firstly, and then what we had to do to get to the top spot, and also what we had to do to get a home semi-final.

“So it’s been a real concerted effort and everyone worked hard and bought into it, which shows the character of the squad again. If you weren’t picked or were on the bench, you worked just as hard to make the preparation good for the rest of the team.”