AFTER a very difficult and unusual week culminated in Saturday’s 38-17 defeat by Munster, there might have been a temptation for Glasgow Warriors to forget about the result. The match in Limerick had huge significance for the home team following the death of their coach Anthony Foley, all the more so since it was a Champions Cup tie and the former forward had been their captain when they first won the trophy in 2006.
But instead of trying to write the game off, Mark Bennett said after the defeat that he expects the squad to report for duty this morning and conduct the usual post-match assessment. And, far from arguing that the circumstances of the Pool One contest were so unusual that little could be read into the way Glasgow played, the centre suggested that an analysis might yield more useful information than usual because so many things went wrong.
“I think we’ll analyse it as we do every other game,” said Bennett, who scored one of his team’s two tries in the second half after coming off the bench. "There will be probably more learning in that game than there is in the games where it all clicks.
“We can look at where we went wrong and what we did to make it a bit easier for Munster, but we can also look at what Munster did so well to put us under so much pressure. We will really focus on taking what we can out of this one.
“Just now it’s very emotional, so we’re all absolutely devastated with it. But by Monday we can come into it and think rationally about the rugby: why it didn’t happen. So it won’t be as emotional then - it will be a case of ‘This is what went wrong, this is why it happened’, and being really analytical with where we go from there.”
Bennett accepted that Glasgow simply did not turn up for the match - a failure that came as a surprise to him after a week of what felt like solid preparation for the game. “We warmed up well, trained really well this week, so I think as a team we were in a good place. Why we didn’t, who knows? It wasn’t good enough at the start.
“We started the game poorly, and Munster really rose to the occasion and put us under a lot of pressure. Munster were outstanding, they really were. They came together as a team and performed on what was a great occasion for a great man. They put us to bed - as simple as that.”
After getting off to a great start in the pool with a five-point win over Leicester, Glasgow now have to get their campaign back on track with December’s double-header against Racing 92, last year’s runners-up. “If we’d managed to back up the Leicester result on Saturday, we’d have been in a great place going into the next two,” Bennett added. “We’re still in this group, but we really need to up it when we next come out.”
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