Southern Kings 38 Glasgow Warriors 31

After a performance that made a mockery of the pre-match talk of the benefits of team bonding, one of Glasgow Warriors’ senior players admitted that carelessness and an inability to recover from blunders had gifted South Africa’s Southern Kings a shock Pro 14 win.

Some pride was salvaged in the final quarter as four tries from Nick Grigg, DT van der Merwe (2) and Fraser Brown were registered to claim a losing bonus point, replacement stand-off Adam Hastings converting them all, but it was a humbling day for previously unbeaten Glasgow and Ruaridh Jackson admitted as much.

“We were just far too loose, a lot of dropped balls and really slow to react to them. They were obviously fired up, physical and pounced on anything loose and severely punished us. It will be a painful one to look back on, that’s for sure,” said the man who has once again stepped in at full-back for the injured Stuart Hogg.

The squad had spent the week in the holiday hot-spot of Cape Town ahead of the game, before moving to Port Elizabeth for the match and while coach Dave Rennie defended that decision, noting that they had taken a similar approach when they stayed in Johannesburg before beating the Cheetahs the previous week, Jackson pointed out that they had also started that match poorly with the principal difference being that they left themselves too much to do this time.

“We re-grouped fairly well last week, but for some reason couldn’t this week,” he said. “We were a bit further behind and the fact that we hadn’t even scored a point come half-time was a bit of a shock, whereas we were only a score behind last week. So, we maybe tried to force things a bit too much trying to chase it and a bit of panic set in.”

While recognising the impression they had given, he denied that he and his colleagues had been complacent as the Kings raced into a 24-point lead with tries from Yaw Penxe, Martin du Toit, Rudi van Rooyen, all converted by Masixole Banda, who also put over a penalty, a fourth converted try from Harlon Klaasen putting them 31-0 up in the third quarter, before du Toit’s second, in the 71st minute stemmed the Warriors fightback as they claimed their first win of the season and only their second in 25 outings in the competition.

“With all the dropped balls and stuff it maybe looks that way (but) certainly, from a personal point of view, there was no taking these guys lightly,” he insisted.

“We saw last week against the Cheetahs how punished we were in the first half and we spoke about it this week and it was frustrating to see out on the pitch that when we dropped balls we were slow to react again. It’s going to take a few honest looks in the mirror, that’s for sure and an honest assessment of ourselves is going to have to be had.”

If there is any trace of consolation to be taken from the experience it is that, having made nine personnel changes and one positional switch, the coaches should be considerably clearer about their best starting XV heading into the European Champions Cup in three weeks time.

Jackson meanwhile also reckoned that the timing of this result could prove beneficial since Glasgow went into last season’s Champions Cup with the last unbeaten record in Europe’s top professional leagues, only to exit the competition meekly, losing their first five matches.

“I hope so. We’ll see in the next couple of weeks,” he said when asked if it could prove useful in terms of focusing the minds of players as well as management.

“I think it is. These sort of things can sometimes be a real reminder that we can’t just coast along and things will just come good. Come game day we need to be switched on and hopefully everyone learned some lessons from this. I personally believe failure can sometimes be a real good thing. Certainly, doing it this time in the season will give us time to have an honest reflection on ourselves and hopefully we can put things into place and right the wrongs. I think that can put us in a better place. We can definitely use it as a tool to push on and I really hope we can do.”