Franco Smith opens up on his future after end of Glasgow Warriors\u2019 reign as URC champions<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n\u201cThe challenge is probably that the structures aren\u2019t bedded in and as a consequence we\u2019ve not really had the opportunity to test and stress test the thinking.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe all believe that there is a place for foreign players, they just have to be the right ones in the right moments.\u201d<\/p>\n
Backing Scotland\u2019s\u00a0teams to be competitive despite smaller squads<\/p>\n
Despite Scotland\u2019s professional teams having smaller squads from next season, Williamson believes they will still be competitive.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would be less confident if we weren\u2019t making a change to the pathway,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we\u2019re trying to do is we\u2019re trying to intensify the investment in a slightly smaller group of players who propel more quickly and there is a question absolutely as to whether that has a short-term impact on performance.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you really look at the number of high-quality young players that are sitting in and around both those squads, I think that we should feel confident that whilst they may need some sort of blooding into first team rugby, we\u2019ve got a ton of quality.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re essentially saying if there\u2019s a Scottish player who\u2019s good enough they\u2019ll play and I think we need to encourage that because if we don\u2019t do that, I don\u2019t see how we can propagate enough players into the senior first 15 to make us more competitive than we currently are.\u201d<\/p>\n
READ MORE:<\/b> Henco Venter opens up on reluctant Glasgow Warriors departure after Scottish Rugby directive<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scottish Rugby chief executive Alex Williamson is keen for Glasgow Warriors head coach Franco Smith to remain in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":200469,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7826],"tags":[748,9436,918,8979,4884,225,12,712,16,15,4510],"class_list":{"0":"post-200468","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-glasgow","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-franco-smith","10":"tag-glasgow","11":"tag-glasgow-warriors","12":"tag-great-britain","13":"tag-home-page","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-scotland","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom","18":"tag-united-rugby-championship"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200468"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200468\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/200469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}