SCOTLAND CAPTAIN GREIG Laidlaw refutes the suggestion that Glasgow Warriors illegally targeted Conor Murray in their Champions Cup encounter this month.
And the scrum-half has promised another rough day in store for his opposite number when Ireland begin their Six Nations campaign in Murrayfield on Saturday.
The Munster nine went on the record in the days following the narrow victory in Scotstoun to say he was “properly pissed off” as he felt Warriors players deliberately targeted his standing leg when he was launching box kicks.
His head coach Joe Schmidt gave his backing to Murray on the issue, but of course, there is a very different point of view across the Irish Sea.
“Glasgow did everything within the rules of the game. As a nine you are always going to get teams putting pressure on you,” Laidlaw said today.
“In that game, Glasgow got a a chargedown on him, but they were trying to get the ball back – they weren’t trying to deliberately injure the player.
Will we be putting pressure on him? For sure we will. He’s not going to come to Murrayfield and get an armchair ride.
“We need to do that to every Irish player but we can expect the same back, I’m sure.”
Speaking at Carton House earlier, Murray’s provincial and international team-mate CJ Stander played down the notion that there would be any residual bad feeling spilling over from the Champions Cup clashes to the international stage. Instead, he echoed the sentiment of Peter O’Mahony that Munster ought to have worked harder to protect their scrum-half’s blindside.
“Not really. From the Munster side we let him down a bit that weekend and we didn’t really look after him as much as we could.
“We’re all concentrating on our job. We know what we need to do. We’ll just make the ball available to him and… well, he’s a big man, he’ll look after himself.”
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