Warrior Spirit

After plummeting in standards, Glasgow have been transformed by coach Franco Smith this season. Here's how he turned things around...

- TOM ENGLISH

AT THE end of March, in a display that made locals in Limerick gawp in shock and possibly awe, Glasgow Warriors laid waste to Munster at Thomond Park in the United Rugby Championship. Scoring four tries in the first half and accelerating into a 28-0 lead, the stuff they produced was borderline cosmic. They ran with elan. They were thunderous, ambitious and lethal.

That win came after Glasgow put 50 on Zebre and not long before they put 70 on the Dragons in the Challenge Cup. It was the continuation of an unbeaten run that was more thrilling than anything Glasgow had delivered since the halcyon days of 2015 when Gregor Townsend's team stormed to a Pro12 title.

Fraser Brown, the veteran Glasgow Warriors hooker, tells a story about his coach Franco Smith and the endlessly whirring machinery in the brain of the former South African ten. It occurred in the midst of all of those victories.

Brown says that Smith contacted him in the week of the Munster game in March and said that he’d woken at 2am with different ideas for ten different players in his squad, things that came to him in the night and which he wanted to impart, pronto. His vision for Brown was something about making the Glasgow lineout more dynamic and “quicker, quicker, quicker” as he put it.

“The first thing that struck me,” says Brown, “was him waking up at 2am with loads of ideas in his head. That’s pretty impressive. The second thing was the clarity of the message. Franco knows his own mind. He knows exactly what he wants. Complacency is his great fear and he does everything to make sure it never creeps in. It’s exactly the kind of standards that we let slip last season.