It says everything about the standards Glasgow hold themselves to these days that there was a trace of frustration in the air at Scotstoun along with all the stardust after Friday’s vivid 23-7 win over Racing 92.
So early had Gregor Townsend’s team taken care of the core business of dispatching one of the most lavishly funded club sides in the world, you could understand them being emboldened enough to think a bonus point had been theirs for the taking. Five points would have been a great night — four ranks as merely very good.
Even so, positioning the last 30 minutes as an opportunity missed in itself shows how good Glasgow had been in the first 50, a spell when the Warriors produced some of their most complete, most compelling rugby in the four and a half years Townsend has been in charge. For the second time in six days, they played with a purpose and a panache which made a mockery of Racing’s plan to bully them.
Glasgow had the better of the physical confrontation, too, their set-piece as dominant as it ever has been against opponents of this repute and the aggression and line speed of their defence catnip to Matt Taylor upstairs.
Racing’s approach of sending out the biggest blokes they could lay hands on and hoping it would somehow come together on one of the fastest tracks in Europe was exposed for the idiocy it always looked as the home side ran them ragged, inspired by the brilliance of Finn Russell.
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As he had in Paris, the stand-off walked off clutching the Man of the Match award and with rose petals being scattered at his feet by pundits across the land. Dan Carter has presumably now emerged from the 24-year-old’s back pocket, but if Russell continues in this vein, all happy feet, slick hands and quick thinking, he’ll surely get a crack at the great man’s All Black successors next summer.
Russell has all the gifts in attack, and an incorrigible appetite in defence. If we’re being picky, and the best players invariably are, he does still occasionally over-egg things, but exuberance is a cornerstone of his game you’d be reluctant to chip away at.
Collectively, Glasgow have shown incredible maturity in these back-to-back victories over a team that won the Top 14 and reached the final of the Champions Cup last season, and the pattern continued post-match at Scotstoun with that self-criticism about the missing bonus point. Perhaps they simply had too long to think about it. Where the first 50 minutes, which brought tries for Josh Strauss, Fraser Brown and Ali Price, was the Warriors at their intuitive best, there was an element of trying to be too cute in their quest for the fourth score.
It’s also the case that Racing, who up until this point had honoured Johan Goosen by not turning up, began to actually get involved.
“The last 30 minutes it got a bit loose,” admitted Russell. “As Gregor said, great win but if we’d kept on playing the way we did in the first 50 minutes, we probably should have got the bonus point.”
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Even in defeat at Welford Road yesterday, Munster claimed their third bonus in as many games, meaning that if they win their match in hand away to Racing on January 7, they will be back at the top of Pool 1 before they come to Scotstoun the following week.
It is not too hard to envisage a scenario where Glasgow win that one narrowly and Rassie Erasmus’s team twice beat Racing comfortably, leaving the Warriors needing a bonus-point victory away to Leicester on the same day Munster host the Parisians to have any chance of finishing top. There is a safety net for three of the five teams who come second in their pools, but the Warriors are still four points shy of the lowest tally (17) that has ever been enough to progress.
There are so many permutations. Can Racing dredge up even a suggestion of pride and throw a spanner in Munster works? Are Leicester back in the hunt? Their own lack of bonus points will make it tough; about as tough, in fact, as they are sure to make it for Glasgow in the Midlands on the closing weekend.
Taking all that into consideration, we need only look back to the 38-17 defeat at Thomond Park for a reminder that the maths could be looking a lot worse. Even allowing for the tide of emotion that carried Munster forth that day, the meekness of Glasgow’s display meant you would have got long odds on them beating anyone back-to-back, let alone a side who spend around three times as much as Townsend can on their squad each year.
“Our forwards did an amazing job and fronted up, and physically we just beat them,” said Russell, who didn’t play like a man who had injured his calf in the warm-up. “It’s great for us to take confidence from that and go into any game knowing how good we can be.”
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Glasgow will hope to carry this form into the Boxing Day derby away to Edinburgh. Three straight Pro12 losses were sustained without the bulk of the international contingent who have energised the team in the past two games, but the same doesn’t go for three consecutive defeats in the inter-city fixture itself.
“That’s been mentioned already,” smiled Russell, who is set to go up against his former Scotstoun understudy Duncan Weir. “Edinburgh will be big and physical, but if the forwards play the way they did against Racing they’ll give the backs good ball and make my job easy.”
It was a night of unexpected comfort, with that one little nagging doubt at the end of it.