RICHARD Cockerill exuded quiet satisfaction last night after seeing his Edinburgh team beat Glasgow Warriors 23-7.

The head coach had had a game plan and it worked almost to the letter against his more illustrious opponents, who have now won just once in their last seven outings at Murrayfield.

No matter what his players did in attack in this first 1872 Cup match of the season, Cockerill knew the key to getting the better of Glasgow was to pressurise them into errors.

Edinburgh did that all right, with both tries by Duhan van der Merwe coming from interceptions of passes from Adam Hastings – the Glasgow playmaker who had somewhat over-confidently suggested his team would be targeting 10 points from the festive double-header against the team from the capital.

“I thought we defended really well tonight,” Cockerill said. “When they’re under pressure it makes them force the game and they make errors.

"We forced opportunities by putting them under pressure defensively.

“They’re a really good team, but we’re really pleased that we put a performance in to be able to beat them and at times make them look a little bit ordinary. And they ran out of ideas.

“They make errors, they’re high risk/high reward and if you let them play like that, they will hurt you. We managed to control that reasonably well tonight.”

Edinburgh have now won three big games on the trot, with this match coming hot on the heels of their home and away victories over Newcastle in the Champions Cup.

Cockerill will now simply demand of his players that they go out and do the same again on Saturday when they travel to Glasgow for game two of the three-match series.

“All the good sides I’ve played in and coached, they rock up every week and put a performance in.

"We’ll go to Scotstoun with pretty much the same team and try to win. That’s just how it is.

"We’ve been a protected species up here for too long. That’s the real world, proper rugby. Let’s turn up week in week out and perform. That’s the game.”

The game for Dave Rennie is to find ways of shoring up his under-pressure scrum – no easy matter given his first-choice hookers, Fraser Brown and George Turner, are both out injured for the next two months – and to ensure his team stay true to their spirit of adventure without becoming as reckless as they were at times yesterday.

One way of dealing with the scrum, according to the Warriors coach, is to ensure a fair contest – something he will bring up with the officials before the return game.

“You’ve got to push straight,” he said. “If they are just going to walk around they are constantly walking around and getting rewarded for it. Good on them for keep doing it.

“Refs have been much tougher. If you don’t push straight you don’t get rewarded, but it wasn’t the case tonight. We will ask them questions round that and hopefully we will get a better result for next week.”

The coach also thought the yellow card shown to his captain, Callum Gibbins, was harsh.

“He was still coming back,” he said of the incident, in which the openside interfered with an Edinburgh attempt to recycle metres from his own line.

“Maybe somebody else should have been yellow-carded. He was left scratching his head.”

More generally, however, having made those temperate criticisms of the referee, Rennie acknowledged that his team were second best in most departments of the game, and that this was not simply a game in which refereeing decisions had cost his team the game.

“We were really disappointed with our ball in hand,” he continued. “We knew they would kick a lot to us and they were going to press really high, but we were too lateral and then tried to throw passes over the top and we were exposed.

“Look, that was disappointing, as it was nowhere near the standard at which we’ve been playing. We have to be able to adjust at how the game is going. The key is we can’t play flat on the line against these guys and with no width.

“We had a plan against these guys and knew how they would defend, but didn’t do it well enough. I’m not going to tell you guys what it is, as we can still hopefully try to do it next week.”

Will they still try to do it with Hastings at stand-off? Almost certainly.

“Yes, he made a couple of errors tonight and he’ll learn from that,” Rennie added. “That’s on the big stage in front of the whole Scottish public. Look, he’s a good kid and a good player but tonight wasn’t his best.

"We all have to look at how we played and performed and prepared.”