DAVE Rennie had no complaints about his team’s 12-7 defeat by La Rochelle, nor the red card shown to No.8 Matt Fagerson in the closing minutes of the Champions Cup match.
The Glasgow Warriors head coach believed his team had done enough to merit more than a losing bonus point but accepted they had only themselves to blame for failing to turn heaps of possession and a number of scoring opportunities into points in a scoreless second half.
“I think we certainly deserved it. We had all the ball at the right end of the park in the second half,” Rennie said. “Disappointed to be down at half time – we let a couple of soft ones in – and we didn’t deal very well with the wind. They won all the little battles around the aerial and all the stuff on the deck.
“In the end there were so many opportunities to score – just one more pass and we’re over. We created so many opportunities and you’ve got to turn those into points – and we didn’t.”
Glasgow thought they had turned an 80th-minute chance into points when Scott Cummings crossed, but foul play by Fagerson saw the try chalked off.
“I’ve had a look at it and there’s clearly a forearm to the throat,” Rennie accepted. “It’s an attempted fend and he hasn’t quite got it right.
“Obviously it came on the back of a try… it would have been a tough conversion from there for Adam [Hastings] but you never know.
“It’s disappointing. We created so many other opportunities but lacked patience and tried to score off the first phase when we should have gone multi-phase.”
La Rochelle had only kept the Warriors out by giving away a number of penalties which, with another referee, might well have produced a penalty try. Wayne Barnes did eventually sin-bin scrum-half Alexi Bales, but Rennie was not happy with his slowness to show the yellow card.
“Yeah, there were a massive amount of penalties in succession which we thought would have been dealt with a little bit earlier. Of course if you’re getting away with it you keep doing it.
“In the end there were so many opportunities to score - just one more pass and we’re over. We’ll look at ourselves first.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel