Glasgow Warriors coach Dave Rennie has paid tribute to Stuart Hogg after the two-time British & Irish Lion salvaged a PRO14 opening-day victory for his side.

Sporting a new shaven-headed look, Hogg demonstrated an addition to his already vaunted repertoire when he fired over a drop goal six minutes from time to edge out hosts Connacht 27-26 at The Sportsground, making it the third successive year that Glasgow have opened the league season by winning in Galway.

“He was excellent, but not just at what was obvious,” said Rennie.

“It was his first drop goal at this level, but he bangs them over in training and nails them from 60 yards. It was really smart to drop back in the pocket like he did. Obviously, he also kicked a pretty important conversion and he laid on the first try, but his contribution is also around leadership and we were very happy with the composure shown by a lot of our leaders to manage our way through that. We’ll be a lot better for it.”

Rennie admitted that Hogg was lucky to get away with carrying the ball behind his own goal-line and touching it down just seconds before the end of normal time, which should have resulted in a five-metre scrum with the home team putting the ball in, instead of which he was allowed to relieve pressure with a drop out from the 22 metre line.

However, for all that the coach also felt his side had infringed too often, he reckoned Glasgow had also suffered unfairly at the hands of the officials, so were perhaps due for a mistake to go their way on a day when Tommy Seymour opened the scoring in the first minute, while George Turner, co-captain Ryan Wilson and Adam Ashe also crossed the opposition line.

“It is a concern. It’s way too many, we’ll have a look at it and there were a handful there that we don’t agree with at all,” he said of the penalty count.

“The touch judges had a fairly big role in some of them, but there were some dumb ones too. I think we were penalised three times for taking out the half back, so we’ve got to be better in that area. It had a big bearing on the game today, but likewise for them, they were penalised a few times as well.”

They got their luckiest break of all in injury time when Craig Ronaldson’s last-ditch penalty attempt from close to halfway struck the wrong side of the left post, but Rennie said that the referee had admitted afterwards to having got that decision wrong when penalising Nick Grigg for a ruck infringement.

Even so, claiming a full five points from the match represented a bonus in every sense since, in spite of scoring the four tries required to claim the extra point, a lack of discipline was not the only way in which Glasgow were far from their best.

“We made a lot of errors and we’ll look back and think we could be better in a lot of areas, but up front we were excellent and it had a massive bearing on the game,” Rennie acknowledged.

“We just need to be a little more patient, we made a lot of yardage through the middle and then we tried to go wide a couple of times when it wasn’t on.

“Defensively, we defended our best in the last 10 minutes and showed the kind of intensity we need. We weren’t happy with the lack of intensity and missed tackles in the first 40 minutes.”

What made that observation all the more telling was the context of the overall intensity of the first weekend of the PRO14 which was at a different level than in previous years as the competition has developed from Celtic League, to PRO12 and now to the PRO14.

Five of the seven matches were decided by a single score, with title holders Leinster, who also won the European Champions Cup last season, leaving it even later than Glasgow to claim their single point 33-32 win at European Challenge Cup holders Cardiff – Bryan Byrne converting his own decisive try with only two minutes remaining.

The latest winning score of all was registered in Belfast where a 79th-minute John Cooney penalty that saw Ulster mark former Scotland forwards coach Dan McFarland’s first match in charge of them with a 15-13 defeat of the Scarlets.

On an otherwise disappointing opening weekend for the Welsh regions, the four-time champions Ospreys were rewarded for their proactivity in the transfer market by George North whose game-breaking ability proved the difference between the sides as he stepped his way through for one try and powered clear for another, before Blair Kinghorn’s late score brought the score back to 17-13 to grab a bonus point for Edinburgh.

However, for all that the South African teams began weakly away from home, just as they did on their introduction to the competition a year ago, the 38-0 thrashing handed to last season’s semi-finalists the Cheetahs at Munster proving by far the most one-sided encounter of the weekend, arguably the most encouraging aspect of the weekend was that both Italian sides claimed victories.

Admittedly Zebre had the advantage of setting out at home against the weaker of the South African teams, the Southern Kings, beating them 32-16, but the fact that the Dragons had to score a late try to take a bonus point from in losing 21-17 at home, suggested that Benetton Treviso may at last be set to pose a serious challenge this time around.