Ulster Rugby v Glasgow

It’s the final home game of a turbulent season this evening as two old and proud rivals confront each other at Kingspan Stadium. STANDARD SET BY WARRIORS THE TARGET

Each has starkly different prospects as the chase for the league title hastens, and the battle for a place in the play-offs becomes secondary for an Ulster team with an ambition to qualify for a Champions Cup spot next season. Glasgow Warriors sit proudly atop Conference A of the Guinness PRO14, Scotland’s top club side by a distance, and already assured of a home play-off semi-final after a thumping return to form last weekend in Connacht. Ulster go head-to-head in a ‘crossover’ fixture which carries huge importance. Games between these two sides in recent seasons have become rather season-defining, the quest for a place in the Final of the league frequently the prize. Ulster’s pursuit has, it must be said, been disappointing while the Warriors is a club reshaped on and off the field, a once middling operation which has mirrored its transformation in terms of performances with new facilities and an organisation setting sights firmly on joining Europe’s elite. The Warriors survived Scotland’s rather indifferent embrace of the professional club game, and while there are certainly some signs of some awakening in Edinburgh the pre- eminent force in the land is based at the new- look Scotstoun. The coaching team headed by Dave Rennie inherited a playing squad which has grown steadily in both confidence in itself and in the scope of its rugby skillset. Former Head Coach Gregor Townsend – now in charge of an increasingly credible Scottish team – was given the time to impose his very particular mark on the Warriors, and the familiar cavalier attacking instincts have long since comfortably been infused with a discipline up front. The forwards were famously scavenging, but the work in the loose, on the ground and in the maul, has been allied with a scrum unit which, even during the Six Nations campaign, had Matt and Dan Fargerson and Chris Fusaro to

call upon, while flanker Matt Smith and lock Kiran McDonald are getting vital experience in a pack where blindside Rob Harley still features prominently, last week in Limerick setting a new appearance record with his 181st cap in the win over Connacht last weekend. Jonny Gray, Fraser Brown and Zander Fargerson are steeled internationals, and with no European distractions Rennie’s squad looks towards the play-offs with a ‘full deck’ and an expanding pool of players skilled and experienced in the furnace of the Guinness PRO14. Behind the pack danger lurks everywhere, with Lions Stuart Hogg and Tommy Seymour, once of this parish, and top-level quality is evident in the shape of Ruaridh Jackson, Finn Russell, Alex Dunbar, Lee Jones, Ali Price, Henry Pyrgos and – having returned to Scotstoun – the record try- scoring Canadian winger DTH van der Merwe. Glasgow supplied no fewer than eleven players to the national squad for the thunderous Calcutta Cup win at Murrayfield when England’s defeat hardly drew many tears from the five other sides in the Six Nations. The way in which Eddie Jones’s over-hyped team was dismantled by the Scots was rightly lauded, and it’s an irrational hope that the media will try to temper its obsession with a group of fine but significantly over-rated English players. Scotland cleverly used Glasgow regulars Hogg, the outstanding Huw Jones, Peter Horne, Seymour, and Russell in both structured attack and well-organised defence, and up front Gray and Ryan Wilson were superb in a pack which was shorn of a fabled ability to catch the eye before losing composure and collective impact. So too at the Warriors in recent years as the club regularly contests the PRO14 play-offs, where players are shrewdly deployed on a ‘horses-for- courses’ basis, key figures rested when possible only to be unleashed – as against Connacht last week – when a ‘fully-loaded’ Warriors went back on the bonus-point hunt.

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