GLASGOW stand-off Finn Russell has insisted that his team can still qualify for the knockout stages of the European Champions Cup despite their 26-15 home defeat by Northampton on Saturday night.

It was a second win for the English club, who now sit on eight points at the top of Pool 3. French team Racing are second on five points after beating the Scarlets at the weekend in their first match, while Glasgow and the Welsh side are bottom on zero.

With only the pool winners qualifying by right for the quarter-finals, the Warriors are up against it, and realistically need to win next month’s double-header against the Scarlets to have a chance of coming out on top. But Russell is confident that he and his team-mates can do that - and suggested that, given few pool winners win all six of their matches, little had really changed.

“It's still the same,” the Scotland playmaker said. “Hopefully, we want to win all our games, but obviously this was not one of them. Now we need to win four or five of the next five games to qualify.

“That's not us out of the tournament at all. It makes it a bit tougher for us, but we’re definitely not out of the tournament.”

The Warriors came back into the match in the second half after trailing 21-10 at the break, but left themselves with too much to do against a well-drilled English team who were always dangerous on the counter-attack. Peter Horne and Josh Strauss got Glasgow’s two tries, while Russell converted one and added a penalty. Ah See Tuala with two and George Pisi were the Saints’ try-scorers, with Stephen Myler claiming 11 points from three penalties and a conversion.

One real worry for head coach Gregor Townsend was seeing hooker Pat MacArthur come off early in the first half after aggravating a jaw injury. Georgian international Shalva Mamukashvili came on to make his debut, but the Warriors are already stretched in that department, as Townsend explained.

“We've already had three hookers out for a few months and for Pat to go off early in the game was tough. Pat whacked his jaw on Monday at training. The X-ray was clear and then he got whacked on the same bit.

“It was bad luck: one of those nights when from the beginning, it didn't go our way.

Fingers crossed it’s not broken. He's going off for an X-ray. We've got a couple of academy players that we can bring in.”

Whoever plays at hooker in the coming weeks, the Glasgow pack will need to play a lot better in the scrum and lineout if they are to revive their chances in Europe. Townsend expects them to show that improvement in their coming league games, both of which are at Scotstoun - against Treviso this Friday and then Leinster eight days later.

“We have two games before we play Scarlets, and that will be a reasonably good test of our set piece, which is what we want. I'm sure there will be a lot of scrum and lineout work this week in training and Treviso at the weekend will be a good marker of whether we have improved from Northampton.”

The games against the Scarlets are at home on December 12 then away a week later. The match in Northampton is in mid-January. A date for the away game against Racing, postponed 10 days ago because of the terrorist attacks in Paris, has yet to be announced, although early January has emerged as the most likely time. The pool should end with the home game against the French team later that month.