Fresh-faced and barely nine months of his teens he may be, but Jonny Gray stamped his mark against one of the greatest locks ever to play the game on Saturday.
The 20-year-old Glasgow and Scotland lock was a pretty much undisputed man of the match up against Ireland’s great Paul O’Connell as the Warriors knocked Munster off the top of the Guinness PRO12 in another Scotstoun thriller between the teams to match last season’s semi-final.
As in the ferocious May match Glasgow prevailed, but it required an enormous turnaround from an 18-9 half-time deficit that more than a few of the 6700 crowd thought looked insurmountable.
Gray was at the heart of everything for the Warriors, helping set up Leone Nakarawa’s try to get Glasgow back into the game, excelling in the defensive effort to shut out Munster, and then combining with his second row partner again for the try that edged them ahead 21-18 with six minutes left.
Even then his influential work wasn’t done, as he took immediate responsibility for making sure the Munstermen wouldn’t be able to respond, as team-mate Rob Harley related.
“Sometimes it’s hard to believe Jonny’s only 20, the way he’s playing,” said the flanker, who also played alongside Gray for Scotland in all three of the Autumn Tests. “We hadn’t made things easy for ourselves all day, the way we dealt with kick-offs especially, giving them easy territory deep in our half and letting them put us under pressure.
“Given that we hadn’t done that all day, when Jonny’s scored the try to put us ahead he then goes up at full height to get the kick-off and secure the ball, which was crucial in the end.
“He’s always taking responsibility, whether it’s calling lineouts when they’re putting pressure on our throw, or in defence we have a points league where you keep a tally of how many tackles you make in a row without missing, and Jonny won it easily last year.
“Even in attack, he always gives us good go-forward, as he did for Leone’s try. I think he sat Paul O’Connell down at one point on a carry, and I know he’ll be chuffed with that.”
Head coach Gregor Townsend and assistant Matt Taylor are not ranters in the dressing room by nature, but their short and to the point assessment at the break perhaps showed how crucial this victory was for the Warriors.
18-9 down at half-time against what Townsend believes is “maybe the one team in world rugby you do not want to go behind against” Glasgow were staring down a run of four losses in five games that might have punched a hole in their entire season.
While they sorted things largely at half-time and dominated the second period, Munster’s loss of skipper Peter O’Mahony to injury with the score still at 18-9 and then fly-half JJ Hanrahan losing his bearings with his goal kicking proved and influential assistance to Glasgow’s cause.
Hanrahan missed two relatively simple kicks which would have stretched Munster’s advantage going into the final few minutes, after Nakarawa had reached out to score the try that brought Glasgow back into the game.
However there was no doubt the better side in the second half was the home team, and they deserved Gray’s late score off a Nakarawa off-load when DTH van de Merwe had been hauled short of the line on a mazy run.
“They might have been a few people in the crowd who thought when Munster were 18 9 up that they would win, so it was great for the players to work that out themselves, especially after two close defeats against Toulouse,” said Townsend.
“Keeping them to zero in the second was the key. Guys like O’Connell have been in these situations many times and know how to manage a game when they are leading.
“But our guys worked out a way of winning and there was a real good boost from the replacements. I thought the guys came off the bench did really well.
“Matt and I did say some things at half-time, but really the focus was on us just performing better. I felt that what I had seen in the first 20 minutes, if we played well we can win the game, even with a nine-point deficit, and that’s what the players did.”
Rather than going into the two 1872 Cup clashes with Edinburgh in the midst of a losing run, the Warriors can now look forward to the Christmas and New Year meetings with their rivals who they haven’t lost to since January 2011 – with some confidence.
“In terms of the league table, we knew how important this weekend games were,” added Townsend. “We have managed to move up on the table, and the 1872 cup is a season in itself and it will be very important in terms of league position for both teams.
“We knew we needed a performance that shows that we are back on track because it is going to be a tremendous second half of the season.
“The Irish teams will lose points over the next couple of weeks as they play each other, so we have an opportunity now over our next three games to make sure we play as well as we did in the second half for the whole 80 minutes.”