GLASGOW hooker Fraser Brown is looking forward to meeting up with old team-mate Leone Nakarawa tomorrow when the Warriors play Racing 92 in the Champions Cup - at least off the field of play. On the pitch, Brown thinks one of the keys to his team winning in Paris is to steer clear of the big Fijian as much as possible.

“We’ll be trying to stay away from Naksi,” Brown said. “Obviously he knows our systems really well, but it can work two ways.

“It’s not just he’s brilliant, there are still ways we can try and manipulate that or work round it. He does have a couple of weaknesses.”

Nakarawa, who impressed Racing so much when playing against them last season that they decided to sign him from Glasgow last summer, is a doubt for the match after injuring a shoulder while scoring last weekend. But if the second-row forward does fail to be passed fit, Brown hopes he will be able to play in the return leg at Scotstoun a week tonight. “If he does play, the next two games will be a very special occasion for both sides and both sets of supporters, particularly the Glasgow supporters,” the Scotland international added.

Brown revealed that Nakarawa’s closest friend in the Warriors squad was Ryan Wilson, whose children regard him as part of the family. “I don’t know if you’d call them besties - they’re more like brothers.

“I think Becks, Ryan’s wife, cooked Naksi dinner most nights when he first arrived. Ryan’s kids call him Uncle Naks. They get on really well.”

The Warriors lost in Paris in the pool stages of the same competition last season, but went on to win the return match in Kilmarnock. They failed to qualify for the knockout stages then, and this year have already lost one of their two games - so they know they will probably have to beat Racing home and away to have a chance of reaching the quarter-finals for the first time.

“It’s a really exciting game for us,” Brown added. “We played Racing twice last year so we know a little bit about them. We had a really good game against them in Kilmarnock and a difficult game in Paris.

“We’ve lost the last three games [in the PRO12], so it’s a really exciting challenge for us to go and have to put in a performance - not just win, but we’ll have to put in a really good performance to beat them.

“Firstly we need to take care of our set piece. Last year we were probably a little bit outmuscled in our set piece, particularly lineout drives - I think they scored twice off lineout drives.

“We’ve been working hard this year on our lineout defence: it’s a real area of the game where we can’t let them get a foothold. In the last couple of weeks, against Ospreys and Munster especially, that has been a way that we’ve allowed them into the game. And it’s been disappointing for us, particularly as a forward pack, to watch teams come here and try and dominate us like that.

“When we play at tempo we’re such a good team. We need to really focus on playing at tempo, and that means winning the breakdown, winning the collision.”