FRAZIER CLIMO pulled the strings for the home side as they marched to an emphatic victory at sun-soaked Millbrae yesterday afternoon, to book themselves a BT Cup final showdown against Melrose at Murrayfield on April 22.

The Kiwi stand-off created the first try with a pinpoint accurate cross-field kick which sent Danny McCluskey over on the right wing in the sixth minute, promptly added the conversion plus two penalties, and generally kept the visitors pinned back deep inside their own half for almost all of the first half with a masterful exhibition of how to kick into the corners.

Grant Anderson scampered over to make it 18-0 at the break, then Climo got back in on the act with another penalty at the start of the second half, before the playmaker finally killed off any fanciful ambitions Hawks might still have been harbouring of getting something out of this tussle with a try of his own in the 60th minute.

That score was a beauty, created when Ayr won good line-out ball off the top near the halfway line and McCluskey burst onto a flat pass from David Armstrong to rip through Hawks’ midfield defence. The lively winger was eventually pulled down under the shadow of the posts but managed to recycle the ball quickly for Climo to dance over.

“Everything went our way in the first half in terms of how we wanted to play the game and the areas we wanted to play it in. Frazier is worth his weight in gold in terms of putting us in the right areas,” acknowledged Ayr coach Calum Forrester afterwards.

The contest was over by the hour mark but Hawks still had plenty to play for given that they must face the same opposition at the same venue next Saturday in a BT Premiership play-off semi-final. A cricket score in this match would have left them at a huge psychological disadvantage, and although the players will still feel that they have a mountain to climb next week, they did at least manage to salvage some sort of respectability in the final score-line by picking up a penalty try, awarded when replacement home hooker David Young was yellow-carded for collapsing a line-out drive as it marched interminably towards Ayr’s line.

There is no escaping that this was still an 18-point loss, and it comes on the back of two heavy defeats against the same opposition in the league this season, but visiting head coach Finlay Gillies insisted that his team are capable of turning things around inside seven short days so long as they can get their set-piece firing on all cylinders.

“We have no complaints today. We were second best to everything and you can’t beat Ayr without a line-out – if you can’t start a set play then you can’t execute anything. And we can’t continually look to Keir Gossman to step his way past six or seven people to get us out of trouble – we have to manufacture you own chances,” he said.

“If you were to see my sessions on Tuesday and Tuesday night then you’d know that are nothing like that one-up rugby and zig-zaggy stuff that you saw out there. I have never done that, but I think we were rocked by the intensity of their defence. They are a good team – well organised and well drilled.”

“The good thing is that we are still kind of a secret to Ayr. They still don’t know what we are going to do because we haven’t done it against them yet. Ayr could defend one-up rugby all day and we are not going to break the, down like that, so we have certain scenarios and certain patterns which we want to execute – but we can’t do that unless we start winning attacking line-outs.”

Tommy Spinks caused a bit of a stir this week when he informed Hawks that he would be moving to Ayr next season and was stripped of the captaincy for this game as a result, but Gillies was quick to praise the number eight for his battling performance in a lost cause.

“Today showed the calibre of the guy, he was our best player by quite a considerable distance,” said the coach.

Spinks will have to be on top of his game again next week if Hawks are to have any chance of causing an upset. The Anniesland men are also hoping that some of their missing players – such as hooker Cammy Fenton, back-rowers Bruce Flockhart, Matt Fagerson and Matt Smith, scrum-half George Horne and centre Paddy Kelly – might come into the mix.

On this evidence, they will need all the reinforcements they can muster.