AFTER finally ending an eight-month run without a win on the road, Glasgow are determined to build on that when they kick off their Challenge Cup campaign against Bath on Saturday, according to captain Kyle Steyn.
The Warriors just failed to get into the Champions Cup, which is the top tier of European competition and significantly more prestigious. Nonetheless, Steyn insisted last night that his team would put just as much into the battle with Bath as they would have done had they been in the Champions Cup.
“I think both competitions are really difficult - we’d back ourselves in both,” he said. “There are such fine margins sometimes between making the Champions Cup and making the Challenge Cup. You still get an opportunity to play sides in England and France that you don’t normally get to test yourselves against, so there’s still massive excitement round the Challenge Cup.
“I’ve never been to Bath, but the atmosphere at the Rec looks awesome. So I’m looking forward to it.”
“It’s a different competition, but we’ve picked up an away win against Zebre, and being able to double down on that would be massive in terms of solidifying some of the belief within the squad. And two wins are better than one and great for momentum.”
Besides not having won any away games since a Challenge Cup tie back in April, the Warriors had gone 11 months without a victory on the road in the URC. Steyn admitted that failure had got him down at times - especially because the team have continued to play pretty impressively, on the whole, at Scotstoun.
“Yeah, it did,” he continued. “Certainly this season it has, just because it’s quite a strange thing sometimes when you sit in reviews and you’ve played home and away and you try and unpick it - because it just looks like two completely different sides. So it was awesome to go down to Zebre, pick up a win, and deal with the elephant in the room a little bit.
“This time of year is crunch time every year, so you know how important momentum is. It’s a great time of year for rugby: we’ve got Europe, we’ve got the 1872 Cup, all the big moments this half of the season, all the games you want to play in. Very much so, yeah: momentum will be huge.”
