Gregor Townsend’s Glasgow Warriors waiting in the long grass

It is common in professional sport for the protagonists to talk of nothing but their focus on “the next game”, but this weekend’s clash with Munster has been many years in the planning for Glasgow Warriors’ head coach Gregor Townsend.

It is difficult not to over-analyse the importance of these next two weeks for Scotland’s brightest young coach, but for those outside the country, who have witnessed only the high points in his playing and coaching career, his story to this point is an absorbing one.

He sat in front of the media at Glasgow’s Scotstoun Stadium yesterday, looking out on the artificial pitch he had installed after several years of persuading not only Scottish Rugby but also the Glasgow City Council, leisure trusts Glasgow Life and local athletics officials.

He did not hide from the importance of this weekend, followed by a trip to Leicester’s Welford Road, two games the Warriors realistically need to win to turn a promising campaign with victories over the Tigers and Racing 92 into an historic first qualification for the European quarter-finals.

He has to take such an approach, as he criticised himself alongside players, for flaws in their preparation for the first meeting with the men in red, that first match in October after Anthoney Foley’s sudden death.

The passing of Foley hit Townsend hard.

He had grown up playing against the big No8, got to know him as a player, and the two carried that mutual respect into their coaching careers as they took the first steps on the next ladder.

They shared a similar passion and ambition drawn from boyhoods in strong rugby areas, Townsend’s being Gala in the heart of the Borders.

The Scot was a talented footballer and was attracting interest in the round-ball game when he pledged his future to rugby at the age of 13, having watched great Gala teams crowned Scottish champions year after year.

He watched and admired Borderers such as Peter Dods, John Rutherford and Roy Laidlaw win Grand Slams and go on to become British and Irish Lions, and believed that the world stage was attainable for a lad from a town of 14,000.

He became one of Scotland’s first professional union players, joining Ian McGeechan’s Northampton revolution a year before the game went open, and he helped steer the Lions to the 1997 series win in South Africa.

He then went to France, playing for three different clubs, and played in Super Rugby with the Sharks, driven by a desire to prove Scots from a country of just 10,000 adult rugby players could hold their own among the best in the world.

He felt a kindred spirit in Foley and there is little doubt that that made the first European meeting between these sides a tougher challenge than normal.

Townsend attended the funeral and spoke to his players in the lead-up about the importance of honouring Foley and Munster.

He urged them to do that by performing at their very best, physically and clinically, but instead Munster grabbed the game early and Glasgow were a pale, meek shadow of themselves for the first hour.

Townsend reflected on that performance as the worst of the season, and perhaps going further back, but he is astute enough to know too that Munster’s physical, controlled game did for his side at Scotstoun in a dour 16-15 arm-wrestle in December too.

But, crucially, while Munster were missing players, Glasgow were without their inspirational trio of Stuart Hogg, Finn Russell and Jonny Gray; the stars who, with Tommy Seymour, have added that new attacking and finishing quality to Glasgow’s perennial competitiveness that has lifted them into genuine contender category.

Hogg was rested from last week’s Pro12 win over Cardiff, as were front rows Fraser Brown and Zander Fagerson, even though the Warriors fell off the pace without their stars during the autumn window and are needing league points to get back into title contention.

But they all return today with Scotland centres Alex Dunbar and Mark Bennett back in harness outside Russell, with on-form scrum-half Ali Price proving a good deputy for the injured Henry Pyrgos in the No9 jersey.

Having won the Pro12 title two years into his first role as a club coach, Townsend told his players on the opening day of the season that qualifying for the Champions Cup quarter-finals was now the aim, but he has tried to balance that pressure this week with a steely focus on playing just as they have done in previous big matches, which was lost amidst the emotion of Thomond Park in October.

“We’ve built up some good momentum over the past few weeks, but Munster are also in a rich vein of form so we are going to have to deliver a big performance to get a win tomorrow night.

“They work hard as a team, whether it’s in the set-piece in defence or on kick-chase so the Scotstoun crowd will need to be even louder than they were last weekend to drive our players throughout the contest.”

That crowd has become the proverbial extra man for Glasgow in recent seasons, and Townsend takes some of the credit for that too.

He took it personally when, having returned from France to finish his playing career at the re-launched Border Reivers, alongside the likes of Gary Armstrong and Doddie Weir, the SRU shut it down to save money and invest more substantially in the city clubs.

One of the reasons for the Borders’ failure was the SRU’s inability to form ties with the Borders’ existing rugby communities, so, while his family remain in the Borders, Townsend has spent many hours in meetings with local clubs, groups, businesses and individuals from a flat in Glasgow to drive up connections in Scotland’s main football city with the Warriors.

A series of decent sponsorship deals have resulted, 7,000 sell-outs are the norm — double the figure from before he joined — and the team is a greater threat than any from Scotland in the pro era.

It is a legacy of ambition that he will leave when he takes over as Scotland coach in June.

The Borders’ child who grew up believing he could compete with the best in the world has become a man that today badly wants to see his players do the same, by earning respect across Europe.

A loss in Limerick was not fatal to those hopes for 2017, but this “next game” in Glasgow has a lot more riding on it than just four or five points.