DANNY Wilson is confident that the calendar for next season will give Glasgow a far better chance of playing to a consistently high standard than they managed in the campaign just ended.

However, the head coach has also warned that the bulk of his players will need adequate rest after being involved in summer tours, and that it could therefore be a few weeks into the new season before the Warriors are back in action with all guns blazing.

When the formats for both the Champions Cup and the new United Rugby Championship were announced earlier this week, the good news for Wilson was that, unlike in the season just ended, in 2021-22 there will be minimal clashes between those two tournaments and international fixtures. But with Zander Fagerson and Ali Price on Lions duty until early August, a host of players off to Georgia and Romania with Scotland and others away with the national under-20 squad in Wales, Wilson will not be able to field his strongest team in the first few rounds of the URC.   

“Going into this year it will be more like what I thought it was going to be when I took the job,” he said yesterday.” You will need to manage your players and rest and rotate at the appropriate time, but there’s not those clashes. That’s a real positive for me. It was the mirror opposite this year - we had clashes right the way through the Autumn Nations Cup and the Six Nations. 

“So the challenge is less of a challenge - but it hits us far earlier. When our two Lions return they will need a break and time to recover. Then you look at your touring players with Scotland. They will be coming back much later. Then you've got the two boys picked by Argentina,” he added, referring to new signings Santiago Cancelliere and Domingo Miotti.

“We start pre-season mid July, when we're going to have a much smaller group, so when we play our two pre-season games (in early September against as-yet-unannounced opponents) we will only have a certain amount of players available to us. 

“The early part of pre-season into the early part of the season is still going to be a bit disjointed. But once we get through that period what we are going to have, and I'm really excited about, is a longer period with all our group together.

 “Like this year, it is about building that time together, that clarity together, and then hitting the ground running. When they all returned, we went against Montpellier and Treviso - where we were awful - but then we went into a run of four games when I thought we played really well and built our performances towards beating Leinster in the last game of the season.

“Like anything, it takes time together and clarity. But hopefully we will get there after maybe a slightly disjointed start to the season.”

This week’s confirmation that the Warriors will compete in the Champions Cup next season was one of quite a few positives to emerge from the 2020-21 campaign, according to Wilson. Fourth place in their PRO14 Conference was enough for them to get into European rugby’s premier competition, but the coach accepted that the half-dozen wins that got them into that position in the league were not a good enough return for a team with far grander ambitions.

“The positives were we qualified for Europe,” he added when asked to assess the season. “And we finished third in the Rainbow Cup with a good run of four wins out of five and beating Leinster in the last game of the season. We also had back-to-back wins over Edinburgh, which hasn’t been done for a while, and we won the 1872 Cup, which hasn’t been done for a while.

“So there were definitely positives. Negatives: we only won six of our 16 PRO14 games. 

“The other positive is I count seven players we blooded. Ross Thompson ended up as our player of the year as an Academy player - that’s quite an achievement. Those seven will stand us in good stead for next year. So there are positives, definitely, in what has been a very challenging year.”