His side looked ring rusty as they allowed the defending champions to seize control of last night’s PRO14 semi-final from the outset at Scotstoun, but Glasgow Warriors head coach Dave Rennie refused to blame the three-week lay-off since their last regular season match for the nature of their defeat by the defending champion Scarlets.
“We won’t offer excuses around that,” he said. “We had a really good preparation and I think we showed in the last 20 minutes we had a lot of ascendancy and pressure, but it was a little too late.
“We didn’t fire many shots in the first half, gave away too many penalties and gave them too many easy exits. We felt we could get the tempo up and run them off their feet, but we turned the ball over too much.”
“At half-time, 21-3 down, a couple of quick scores and you’re back in the game but we spent so much of the game down in our half first half, their set-piece worked pretty well and showed ability to look after the ball.”
The Warriors cause was undermined when their most potent attacking weapon, Stuart Hogg, was ruled out before the match, but again Rennie was unprepared to hide behind the disruption caused by that, noting that they had sufficient cover in experienced international players.
“He’s got some food poisoning or something,” he said of Hogg.
“He started spewing just after lunch. He got an injection, went out and tried to run but didn’t have anything in the tank. We had Ruaridh Jackson come in, who has been excellent for us, and Lee Jones coming out of the stand [on to the bench]. So that’s a handy couple of replacements.”
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