Franco Smith Q&A after Glasgow Warriors' defeat to Zebre

The Warriors struggled to get on the front-foot, with handling errors costly as the perennial United Rugby Championship basement-dwellers beat the defending champions.  

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• Five things we learned from Glasgow's pre-season loss to Zebre

Here’s every word of Franco Smith’s post-match press conference.  

What’s your assessment of the game?  

If you look at the scoreboard, both sides of the ball wasn't good enough, but that wasn't our main objective.  

If you look at the selection, the two halves that we played, we have second and third choice players who need to step up to what we expect. 

As far back as two years ago, we said we need a quality squad to have a good team or to have a great team. We're going to have to lean even more on these young boys coming through. Not only us - Scotland are going to need to lean on the young boys. 

The objective for us in this first part of the season is to work with the players who have not played rugby for a long time and who need to make a step up when our internationals are going to be away. That was one of the main objectives against Zebre. 

Yes, they made a lot of errors. I think the heat and the sweatiness on the ball was something that you wouldn't be able to see on the television. It was different conditions, but we agreed that we're not going to use any excuses. We're just going to look at the experience gained. 

Your young players will have learned a lot?  

I definitely think they did. Like I said to them, experience is unfortunately exactly what the word says. You've got to experience to understand what's needed. We can challenge them by training really hard, but now they understand. I 

Zebre were really good, much better than they've ever played against us. I'm going to be honest about that. I've always thought they had weaknesses in their maul, they had weaknesses in physicality, they had weaknesses in their lack of resilience and endurance. I saw a completely different set-up here. 

Having been the performance director in Italy, this is what we intended it to be. It looks really, really well organised here. Yes, we made a lot of mistakes. We're going to look at that and try to teach the young boys some things from it and take some of the lessons from it, obviously. 

But I must say, Zebre were a different team than we've ever played. 

Can we expect a first-choice team against Connacht next weekend?  

No, definitely not. Guys like Sione Tuipulotu, Kyle Steyn, Rory Darge, Scott Cummings, Sam Talakai, Zander [Fagerson], Johnny Matthews are only going to be coming in on Monday for the first time.  

Matt Fagerson is getting married on Sunday, so they're going to come in at 12 o'clock on Monday. 

We've worked with a bunch of new players. Ten came in this week. Max Williamspn, Adam Hastings, Jamie Dobie, Gregor Browns - those guys only came in now. 

Last year we had a specific group of internationals. Now, with the summer tour, Gregor has picked even more of our players, which means we've got about 22/23 players not yet ready to play. Half of them came in last week. The rest will begin on Monday. 

Now the temptation will be there, but the reason for this game was not to beat Zebre.

Yes, we wanted to win it, but we want to start the next generation. We're going to definitely be challenged with the fact that there are four internationals in the Autumn Series. Then there are fewer breaks this year leading into the Six Nations. 

We’ll have to see what's out there. Ryan Burke and Jare [Oguntijebu] they actually stepped up as a first-time lock pair at this level. Calum McFeat Smith, he's a Super Series player that we've brought into the environment.  

With all the other under-20 youngsters that we brought in, there was a different objective to this one. 

The result we will use as an inspiration for us to realise that teams are going to come harder at us and we must understand that we are not the surprise package anymore.  

Does defeat change your approach for the Connacht game? 

If we had played our top team against Zebre, yes. But we didn't play the top team, you guys would know that. You can work out in the pecking order where these guys sit. 

The objective was to blood these guys in our environment. Yes, they learned the hard way. We made a lot of handling errors in difficult conditions. There was some good stuff in the defensive side of things, the way we applied ourselves, especially in the first half. 

We lacked a little bit of physicality in the maul set-up, but we scrummed well. We were late on the breakdowns. That always happens in the preseason games. 

Zebre already played last week against Oyonnax and they had the opportunity to make those mistakes. I've just spoken to them now and they actually wish they had another game to kick on from this. 

This is a start for us. I think I reminded them about the Ayrshire Bulls game in Inverness in my first year. It's a similar feel. I think if the supporters out there look at the score, they would be disappointed, but it's absolutely not [about that]. This is a group of Super 6 and under 20 players, with one or two players from our environment to give us cohesion. We played two teams in two halves. 

We had more or less 36 minutes of ball in play. So, it's just a start.  

Have you learned a lot from tonight?  

Yes, of course. I think a lot of people would have seen it's important for Scottish rugby to develop the next generation. If we're going to use the A team plan  to play our second-choice players only, we will get it wrong. 

We need to bring the next generation through. We owe that to Scotland as the franchises. 

We owe them to share our input and, at the same time, to unearth some of these players. To take Glasgow rugby to the next level, but also put pressure on the next generation.  

I hope that these young guys tonight will be in contention in 2031 to play in the World Cup. I hope maybe earlier, but this is a generation we're looking at. Tonight, we just dipped our fingers in that group to make sure they understand what it's going to take.