Glasgow Warriors enter their 2009/10 Heineken Cup campaign at home to French side Biarritz on Saturday afternoon and head coach Sean Lineen today spoke of how he wants that home start to spur his side onto their best showing in the competition yet.
As he named his team to play the Basque side, Sean remarked: “This is the first time during my time here that we’ve had a home start and we need to make it count.

“When in such an intense European competition the crowd can make a huge difference.

“This is Europe. We need to start well instead of making a cameo appearance later in the competition.

“The players have shown a fantastic work ethic for each other over the past two weeks and showed great character to win against a Cardiff side last weekend with five British Lions in it.

“The Biarritz team will contain some world-class players but there are now a number of Glasgow players hitting great form and this should be a good indicator of where they are, especially as most of them will be targeting a place in the Scotland squad ahead of November’s Bank of Scotland Corporate Autumn Tests.”

Only one change is made to the starting XV that defeated Cardiff Blues (21-5) last weekend as Chris Cusiter replaces Colin Gregor at scrum-half having recovered sufficiently from the flu bug that has affected the majority of the squad over the past few weeks.

The Warriors have named a 23-man match-day squad due to a new Law being passed detailing that as of the 2009/10 season forward, each club's match day squad now must contain a minimum of three specialist front row players within the named eight replacements. The eight names replacements must include two props and a hooker.

If all front row replacements are utilised during a game, and there is a further front row injury, and no fit front row player is available from the original starting team or replacement bench, the injured player will leave the field but may not be replaced.

Glasgow Warriors team to play Biarritz in the Heineken Cup at Firhill on Saturday 10 October (ko 3.45pm)

15 Bernardo Stortoni

14 Rob Dewey
13 Dave McCall
12 Graeme Morrison
11 Thom Evans

10 Dan Parks
9 Chris Cusiter

1 Jon Welsh
2 Dougie Hall
3 Moray Low
4 Tim Barker
5 Alastair Kellock CAPTAIN
6 Richie Vernon
7 John Barclay
8 Johnnie Beattie

Substitutes

16 Fergus Thomson
17 Ed Kalman
18 Kevin Tkachuk
19 Dan Turner
20 Kelly Brown
21 Hefin O'Hare
22 Colin Gregor
23 DTH van der Merwe

This article was posted on 7-Oct-2009, 12:34 by Hugh Barrow.