After missing the business end of last season with a broken foot, Josh McKay is more than ready for the competitive action to recommence on Sunday afternoon. And the full-back is convinced that his Glasgow Warriors side, who welcome Leinster to Scotstoun in the first round of the United Rugby Championship, are just as well prepared.
It is a stark contrast to the start of last season, when the Warriors were clearly less than ideally equipped to face up to the rigours of a new campaign. Franco Smith was not long in the door and was still getting to know his squad, and his attempts to do so were hampered by the postponement of the planned pre-season friendlies against Worcester Warriors and Ulster.
In the event, Glasgow had just one outing, in Inverness against the Ayrshire Bulls, before the URC began. Unsurprisingly, they were undercooked in the opening weeks of the campaign, and only reached something like their best form towards Christmas, with away wins against Zebre in the league and Bath in the Challenge Cup.
This time round, all Smith’s ideas are firmly in place, and the Warriors go into today’s game having played friendlies against Zebre and Ulster. McKay, who made his comeback from that injury in the latter match, is therefore confident that there will be no repeat of the tentative start to the last campaign.
“The biggest positive has been that now we’ve had that growth under Franco over last season,” the New Zealander said. “He came into pre-season late, so it took us a while to find our feet last season, whereas now we know how we want to play.
“When we came in this pre-season, there wasn’t as much fine tuning needed to be done. Everyone knows the skeleton of how we want to play, how we want to defend, how we want to attack and move the ball.”
McKay’s team will be favourites to win today, having selected a squad that includes no fewer than seven members of Scotland’s World Cup squad - forwards Zander Fagerson, Scott Cummings, Rory Darge and Johnny Matthews, and backs Huw Jones, Kyle Steyn and George Horne, who will be making his 100th appearance for the team if he comes off the bench. But Leinster finished the regular season on top of the URC, and have greater depth than any other team in the competition, so although they will be without their international contingent, McKay is taking nothing for granted.
“I’d say Leinster are at a stage now where it doesn’t really matter who steps out of the starting line-up - the next man who steps in knows the job he’s got to do. They’re well drilled. We’ve got a lot of respect for the fact that they’ve built a big squad and those boys can step in and step up.”
After hitting that impressive run of form in December, the Warriors went on to reach the Challenge Cup final and the URC quarter-finals. They felt they had failed to do themselves justice in their defeats by Toulon and Munster respectively in those games, yet while the season as a whole may have ended in double disappointment, in retrospect it was one in which substantial progress was made.
That progress, along with the solid preparation work they have been able to put in, will mean there is a greater burden of expectation for the Warriors to shoulder this time round. It is a burden that McKay is more than willing to shoulder.
“You want to win, don’t you?,” he added. “With winning is going to come that pressure. There could be teams chasing us, whereas in the past we were chasing them. People are going to be nipping at your heels as opposed to us going at them.”
It was, of course, frustrating for the 26-year-old to be sidelined as his team were chasing silverware on two fronts, but the upside was that the bulk of his recovery period was during the close season. “Because we had such a long off-season, in a seven-month injury I missed around two months’ worth of rugby. Whereas if you were really unlucky, a seven-month injury could mean you miss seven months of rugby if you did it right at the start.
“Now I feel good, actually. We’ve had a good pre-season. I feel like I was managed quite well over the off season - I still managed to get back home to New Zealand, which was nice.
“And then when I got back I was able to hit the ground running and build up the load, and then the boys came back in and I got back up to where I could train with the team. Probably three weeks training with the team and then I got the first crack out against Ulster. It was pretty rewarding to finally get back out there.”
