Smith not getting carried away with form of high-flying Glasgow
Glasgow Warriors head coach Franco Smith says his side have learned lessons from previous campaigns and will not get carried away with their outstanding form as they battle for two trophies. Epic victories over Toulouse and Saracens helped Warriors qualify for the Champions Cup knockouts as second seeds, securing home advantage for next weekend's last-16 tie against the Bulls and potentially all the way to the semi-finals. Last Saturday's superb win over Leinster sent Glasgow eight points clear at the top of the United Rugby Championship, but Smith says his side have laid promising foundations in previous seasons and failed to deliver silverware.
Smith, who has Scotland internationals Sione Tuipulotu, Huw Jones and Max Williamson back from Six Nations duty and in his starting line-up for Friday's URC visit of Benetton, said: "Everybody realises home advantage is really a contribution to your campaign - it's not the start all and end all, though. "We've proved that to ourselves as well. There's enough pressure on us to perform every week.
The expectation grows and there's more unnecessary pressure on a simple decision-making process. "For now, we want to win every collision. We want to win the lineout ball.
We want to win on competitive scrum time. We want to score as many tries as possible. We want to avoid giving away tries.
If that's the focus then the results will look after itself. "But I do not want to burden the players or the environment with too many external uncontrollables because we've learned, if we're not going to learn from previous campaigns where we fell short because those type of conversations got into the mix, we must try and avoid that. "Therefore, our mission is to focus on the controllables and let the race look after itself.