Even the youngest man in the Glasgow Warriors’ squad has no qualms about poking his finger in the chest of one of his veteran team-mates if it’s required.
Matt Fagerson is not 21 until July and a mere stripling compared to most of his team-mates but there is a philosophy that every voice counts.
“I don’t know if it came after the disappointment of the Saracens game, but the boys know if you don’t front on the weekend it’s not just going to happen,” said Fagerson in exaplanation of the Warriors’ different mindset since their Heineken Cup quarter-final loss.
“It’s really got to come through training and guys are really pushing themselves. It probably is quite hard for a young guy to speak up but the environment we have, everyone takes the feedback and they work on it, no matter who it is.
“Whether it be Jonny (Gray), Fraser (Brown), Adam (Hastings), anyone. Adam is still quite a young guy but he’s dishing it out as good as he’s getting it. It’s not too hard to do that.”
The result has been two outstanding performances against Ulster and Leinster to maintain their place at the top of the PRO14’s Conference A, and a settling of scores with Edinburgh will give the Warriors the home semi-final they crave, probably against Ulster or Connacht.
Those two defeats to Edinburgh at Christmas still wrankle with the Glasgow squad, and there’s a determination to stamp the Warriors’ game on their rivals after Edinburgh being so successful at dictating most of the recent games between the teams.
“Edinburgh have really turned up the last two times we’ve played them and we just didn’t match them physically,” added Fagerson. “They’ve got a very dominant pack as they’ve shown beating Toulon away and their run in the Champions Cup.
“We’re not dwelling too much on what happened around Christmas, we’ve looked at Edinburgh and learned from our mistakes then.
“There is a bit of getting pride back. But we’re just hopefully going to put our best performance on the park.”
And a tough assignment is what they want, as they believe the higher intensity of the run-in to the playoffs this year has been beneficial, he believes.
“Last year we had an easy run to a home semi-final,” he said. “Our run-in this year has been a lot different, a lot tougher and had to test us to see if we can see games out.
“We know we can always score points but it’s the massive defensive effort has come to fruition, definitely in the last two games.”
