It may not be considered overly important by their coach, but Edinburgh’s players could not be more motivated to reclaim the 1872 Challenge Cup than they will be at Scotstoun this afternoon.
After naming the team he hopes can build on last weekend’s victory at Murrayfield, Richard Cockerill declared that winning the trophy does not feature high on his list of priorities and that it was a secondary consideration to accruing the league points that would enhance their chances of further closing the gap on Ulster in their bid to claim the top three finish in their Pro14 conference that would take them into the play-offs and see them join Glasgow Warriors in next season’s European Champions Cup.
However, Sam Hidalgo-Clyne, the scrum-half who has been out of the Scotland picture of late, but enhanced his case for a recall with his contribution to last week’s 14-man victory over Glasgow, believes it has been their turn to teach him a thing or two.
“This week he’s had a bit of an understanding, a bit of a taste of what it means to us,” he said.
“There’s been a few niggles in training, there’s been a wee bit of intensity brought on the club and it’s always like that.
“We’re always underdogs in these games year after year. We just need to keep proving things. Last year we beat Glasgow away, so there’s no reason why we can’t do it again for sure.”
They have now beaten their rivals so often, five times in the last six meetings, that they are entitled to believe the balance of power is shifting, or at least that they have worked out how to beat opponents they know better than any other with many members of both squads regularly working together in the Scotland camp.
“We say it every year, it seems like we want it more and obviously the circumstances at the weekend made it tough for us to play the brand of rugby that we wanted to… but we played the rugby we needed to to win that game,” Hidalgo-Clyne pointed out. “So hopefully coming this week we’ll have 15 men on the park so we can actually show what we can do and score a few tries.”
Even after Simon Berghan was shown his red card last week the game continued to simmer with Hidalgo-Clyne involved in a couple of flare-ups and claiming he is routinely targeted in these matches but feels that helps him get “fired up” rather than proving a distraction. Whether or not that is the case his overall analysis fitted closely with the frustration of Dave Rennie, Glasgow coach, regarding the way his men were “out-passioned” last weekend, but there is still no shortage of respect for today’s hosts.
“They’re a team that have had a lot of success in recent years, so they’re never going to look to us, they’re going to look to themselves as a team and I’m sure they missed a lot of try scoring opportunities as well and I’m sure they’re going to look at those more than we did,” Hidalgo-Clyne pointed out.
“We played in the right areas at certain times and put the pressure on them and they didn’t exploit the chances they had, so I’m sure they’re going to be looking at themselves and everyone knows that with 14 men that could have gone completely the other way and I think we managed it well.”
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