Glasgow Warriors have touched great heights under Franco Smith’s astute leadership. Now the next step is to truly make their mark in the Champions Cup.<\/b><\/p>\n
A European Challenge Cup final appearance in Smith’s first season and a United Rugby Championship title win in his second proved Warriors’ capacity to punch above their weight.<\/p>\n
As with the Scotland national team, there is a sense that while Glasgow have made great strides over the past decade or so, there is a gulf still to be bridged to the elite sides.<\/p>\n
Warriors have reached the quarter-finals of the Champions Cup three times, under Gregor Townsend, Dave Rennie and Smith last season. On all three occasions they were completely dismantled \u2013 going down 38-13 to Saracens in 2017, 56-27 to the same opponents in 2019 and suffering a 52-0 mauling at the hands of Leinster in April.<\/p>\n
After a stunning start to their European campaign this time around, with bonus-point victories away to Sale and at home over Toulouse, there is growing optimism that perhaps this time Glasgow can break through their glass ceiling.<\/p>\n
Wins over Clermont Auvergne in France on Saturday and Saracens at home the following weekend is a tall order, but by no means out of reach. Manage that and a potential route of home fixtures all the way to the semi-finals could open up.<\/p>\n
“I suppose the ball is in our court now,” said Glasgow assistant coach Nigel Carolan.<\/p>\n
“Because we got five points against Sale, five points against Toulouse, it’s certainly changed the perspective on the competitions as well.<\/p>\n
“The URC is important, but we’ve kind of done that the hard way. We know if we’re in even third or fourth, you’ve got to go away, maybe in a semi-final. We’ve been there and done that, that’s not foreign territory for us anymore.<\/p>\n
“But the opportunity to get maybe a home round of 16 [in the Champions Cup], possibly a home quarter-final, there’s a lot riding and we won’t look any further than this weekend.<\/p>\n
“We rested some firepower for this week and we’re going all guns blazing.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Glasgow Warriors have touched great heights under Franco Smith’s astute leadership. Now the next step is to truly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":678330,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13,12,14],"class_list":{"0":"post-678329","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-stories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115849836798342324","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678329","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=678329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678329\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/678330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=678329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=678329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=678329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}