Stick to the script and do not get carried away by the occasion. That will be the message from the Glasgow coaching team to the playing squad on Friday night when they take on Toulon in the Challenge Cup final.
Of course, should the Warriors win the tie at Dublin’s Aviva Stadium - the first European final the team have been involved in - the players will go down in history, just like the team that won the PRO12 final back in 2015. But Gregor Townsend recalled at the weekend that his Glasgow side lost the final the year before that triumph because they had been caught up in the magnitude of the match, and the Scotland coach’s successors at Scotstoun are determined not to make the same mistake this time.
“For us, it’s more about playing the game than the occasion,” assistant coach Nigel Carolan said yesterday. “It’s a big game, but if we go off script and forget what we’re good at, we could be in trouble.
“We just don’t want to get loose against Toulon, who are a team who thrive on chaos. We’re very much a team who are orderly, we have processes planned for almost every facet of our game, and it’s about executing them as accurately as possible.”
After saying there were no new fitness concerns in the squad, Carolan suggested that either of the team’s available recognised stand-offs, Domingo Miotti or Duncan Weir, would start at No 10 in the absence of the suspended Tom Jordan, who would have been the front-runner to take the berth. Centre Stafford McDowall slotted in at stand-off after Jordan was sent off in the URC quarter-final defeat by Munster earlier this month, but his lack of experience in the playmaking position appears to have ruled him out of contention.
Carolan declined to say whether Miotti or Weir would be in the starting line-up. But the more he analysed their competing claims, the more it began to sound likely that the Argentinian would be preferred to the Scot, with Miotti’s performance in the earlier away win against Munster having been particularly persuasive.
“One of our more established tens will probably be the plan,” he explained. “We’ll see how Duncan and Domingo go at the start of the week then decide which of them will start.
“It’s difficult not to have Stafford involved [in some capacity]. He’s been a great and consistent performer for us.
“Either way, both Domingo and Duncan have been training really well. Duncan is an established game-managing 10. He’s got a pretty sound kicking game. Domingo has a little more flair and is very much a confidence player. When his confidence is up, he does some really magical things. The challenge is to have players around him to get the best out of him if we do decide to select him.
“We think that [the Munster win] shows he can handle the big occasion. When he’s got really good and established players around him, it brings out the best in him.
“Duncan is a little bit more conservative, plays more back in the pocket. He has a good kicking game, but generally we are a team who try to break sides down with ball in hand. Most of our kicks are on the front foot, we don’t generally kick off 10. If we do select Duncan, it does change to some degree some of the things we do.”
Toulon also have two stand-offs who are competing for the jersey, Welsh international Dan Biggar and New Zealand Ihaia West, and Carolan believes the former will get the nod. “I think Dan Biggar will start. He is there for these kinds of big games, and we know it’s all about Dan: he wants a lot of the focus and limelight on him.
“He’ll want a lot of the play to go through him in terms of both kicking and running the ball. So we expect a lot of kicks from him, high balls in behind to challenge our back three - but whichever one they select is not really a massive focus for us.”
West was at 10 in the side that lost 43-7 at Racing 92 on Saturday night, but Carolan is not reading too much into that result given Toulon fielded a significantly weakened line-up. “I think they had more of a second team out: our homework was done more on the side which played against La Rochelle the week before, and Lyon the week before that as well. So we won’t take too much notice of what happened at the weekend, and most of our focus is generally on ourselves.
“We know the threats that they bring. They’re a physical team with a big set-piece.
“They decimated Benetton [in the Challenge Cup semi-final] when the weather was poor, but a dry track at the Aviva with the weather expected to be good will be a different proposition, so we’ll pray that the gods are on our side from that point of view.”
