IT'S the old Glasgow Warriors dance: one step forward, one back, one forward again and now see where that takes the team next weekend when the show goes on the road to BT Murrayfield.
As far as Ryan Wilson, one of the Glasgow co-captains, is concerned these close results in tight games, where so much is at stake, are exactly the kind of confidence boost they were looking for to launch them into the new year.
They did it away in La Rochelle, but threw away the gains in the return match. Now they have snatched another victory and the job is to make sure this time they don't undo the benefits of beating Edinburgh by failing to repeat the performance in the return match on Saturday.
"It was a bit scrappy at times, not helped by five yellow cards," he admitted of the last game. "You grind them out and you probably feel better after games like that than when you’ve run away with it. It’s a bit more rewarding, I would say.
READ MORE: Edinburgh's Mark Bennett proud of team-mates despite Glasgow defeat
"We always talk about the physicality and brutality of these games and we try to make sure we get it right. If you speak to guys in their [Edinburgh's] camp and guys who have been there previously, you hear a lot of chat about how they look at these games. It seems they are more important for them than they are for us.
"This week we spoke about how important it was, not only for our league but because we didn’t do very well in the 1872 cup last season and wanted to make amends for that.
"Also, being back at home – we pride ourselves on being a good team at home but we didn’t turn up against Leinster and then a few things went wrong against La Rochelle. We had two losses in a row at home, which is not good enough at all by our standards."
It has been a frustrating season for Wilson and his colleagues. They keep pointing out that by and large they have been playing pretty well until they get into the scoring areas – that is where things have been going wrong.
"When we look at videos, coming on a Monday and going through the games, we are doing so much good stuff, that’s the frustrating thing," Wilson said. "You can look at results and so on but we know on the inside that we’re doing things right. If we were a just little bit more clinical, we can cut teams open.
"There is a point where it all comes together. You might see games where everything goes perfectly but we just have to be a little bit better when things aren’t perfect.
"We will take a massive confidence boost from this game. We’ll take a lot from it and then use it against them when we go to Murrayfield.
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"We wanted an 80-minute performance. We didn’t get it, but for most of it there was a lot of brutality out there. We are pleased with that. The defence was good – we’ve just got to get that balance right in terms of when we’re looking to go for the ball. I’m not sure the ref helped that at the breakdown area."
One things is certain, when Glasgow head for Murrayfield, they are going to have to do it with the same squad they had for this game. There had been talk that Leone Nakarawa might have signed up by the weekend but as one of the Fijian's best friends Wilson knows there's no chance of any deal being done that quickly.
"I think he is away in Fiji at the moment but he’s been in touch, I speak to him quite a bit," Wilson revealed. "I would love more than anything for Leone to come to Glasgow. It would mean everything to the club to have a player like that back here. That would be incredible because he is such an amazing player and a good man as well."
Fortunately, Dave Rennie, the head coach, has been able to rotate his squad enough in recent weeks so that he won't be forced into too many changes for this game, though he is probably going to have to make wholesale changes for the first match of 2020 when they travel to Treviso with a number of players hitting their consecutive-game limits.
READ MORE: Rennie delighted with Warriors' determination to come out on top in arm-wrestle with Edinburgh
The freshness will be helped by the team being given the early part of the week off, returning to training on Boxing Day: "We are playing the same enemy, we don’t plan on changing a hell of a lot," Rennie explained.
"There were a number of things we wanted to put on the park but we didn’t see on Saturday, so it is going to be a case of tweaking a few of those things, but a bit off time with family is important."
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