And you thought the players had it tough?
Previewing a Heineken Cup match these days feels about as exhausting as charging around a rugby pitch and clattering into 16-stone brutes for 80 minutes.
The bloke who uttered that commentary cock-up 'when it's all said and done, that's when the talking has to stop' may have been pilloried for his spoutings but he wasn't far off the mark with those utterings.
At a sold-out Scotstoun tomorrow, Glasgow Warriors will get the chance to let their rugby do the talking again at the end of a long week of head-scratching, chin-stroking, ponderings and post-mortems. Fittingly, the final say fell to the captain Al Kellock.
The opening-round defeat to Toulon last Sunday, a reversal which prompted this tsunami of words in the days that followed, will be put on the back burner if the Warriors can take maximum points from their encounter with a powerful and purposeful Exeter Chiefs.
After five straight victories in the RaboDirect PRO12 Series this season, a run of successes which have propelled them to the top of the table, the Glasgow boys have got used to winning. The Toulon turnover was a painful reality check, though. Every cloud has a silver lining, of course. The positives of racking up four second half tries against the reigning European champions can be tightly clung to and the towering Kellock is determined to get back to winning ways and ensure that the Warriors are the talk of dear auld Glasgow toon come Sunday night.
"The worst thing for me about Toulon was that we build it up so well, we talked and talked about it but in that first half we didn't back it up and that's disappointing, not just from a technical point of view but also in terms of effort," he reflected. "I sat in here last week and said to you guys how do we win this game? We do it by doing something different, by being relentless and going at them for 80 minutes. For whatever reason, some mental, some physical, we didn't do that.
"You have to get over that in the first place, and then there's technical things we can definitely improve on, but then the good thing is we can look at the fact we scored four tries in a very difficult place to score four tries.
"Our attacking game in the second half was as good as it's been all season, our starter plays were executed extremely well and that's what we have to take forward.
"One bad half doesn't make a bad team. We need to win this game. Mathematically, you can always still qualify but this is a game we need to win, we need to be going into these back-to-back games against Cardiff with a minimum of five points."
Gregor Townsend, the head coach of the Warriors, has made a raft of changes for the Exeter clash. This follows on from some tactical tinkering in Toulon which helped turn the tide when Glasgow were in danger of being overwhelmed.
The switch to scrum-half of Niko Matawalu to take over from Henry Pyrgos certainly aided the Warriors' rally and the Fijian will start in that role tomorrow. "He's a fantastically talented player but I wouldn't put it (the comeback) all on him," observed Kellock. "Look at the ball Henry got in the first half? Nobody could have done anything with it. Our forwards got their act together, our setpiece improved and all of a sudden the game opened up which suited Niko.
"I feel sorry for Henry because the forwards didn't do him justice in the first half. We had 36 players up for the Toulon game so we have a great squad. The competition is so good that you have to play well to keep the jersey. There are other guys coming in looking to do the job better. That's the challenge for the guys who have the shirt this week."
Kellock is hoping his men rise to that particular challenge tomorrow. Exeter, boosted by a opening match romp against Cardiff, may not have the star-studded squad of Toulon but their attitude, application and sense of adventure has been applauded by many and their approach continues to reap rewards.
"They're a very good team, but we're a good team as well," concluded Kellock. "We won five games in the league but we were poor, really poor in the first half last week for a number of reasons. So this is huge for us, to show what kind of team we are. We've got such a big crowd coming in, it's a European and all that talk we had from as far back as the launch, it all needs to be backed up now."
And with that, the talking finally stopped.
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