HE had more reason than anyone to be hurting last Saturday, having been literally kicked in the head at the start of a match in which his team was to be metaphorically kicked in the teeth, but Fraser Brown captured the spirit of the season in offering forgiveness to his assailant.

The blow suffered by the Warriors hooker had looked nasty and resulted in a red card that ought to have turned things his side’s way. Instead, even though Simon Berghan’s departure not only reduced their numbers but forced them to withdraw flanker Hamish Watson to accommodate replacement prop Matt Shields, Edinburgh embarrassed their visitors by coming back from 7-0 down at that stage and 17-6 behind in the final quarter to end Glasgow’s 10-match Pro14 winning run.

“I spoke to Bergs afterwards,” Brown said. “It wasn’t malicious. It looks so innocuous – it is those ones that can catch you out. I think he has seen my back and has gone to put his foot on my back in good-natured fun and caught my head.

“There was nothing in it – you just have to be so careful with boots in rucks. These days safety is so paramount, it is headline stuff. It was just one of those things, unfortunate for Simon.”

The real frustration Brown felt was in the failure to capitalise on their advantage.

“Edinburgh played well and we did not play well. We did not stick to our shape, we did not stick to our structure,” said Brown.

“It feels like we say this every time we come to Murrayfield to play Edinburgh – we just played really poorly, we did not hang on to the ball. We spoke all week about keeping the ball, going through the phases, cutting down the mistakes.”

He acknowledged that it is part and parcel of Glasgow’s high-octane style to do so, but that they have to work out how to apply their philosophy more intelligently.

“I think we turn over the ball more than any other team in the league at the moment, that is the nature of the kind of rugby we aim to play, but we have to realise when we have to hold on to the ball and make teams have to work harder in defence,” Brown said.

“They were down to 14 men, had a tighthead prop who was going to have to play 76 minutes and has not played a lot of rugby at this level. There was a bit of naivety from us. We need to learn and need to learn quickly.”

On a personal level the pain was exacerbated by the fact that, with Scotland’s most capped player Ross Ford sidelined, there had been particular interest in his match-up with Edinburgh’s captain for the day Stuart McInally, who wore the No 2 jersey throughout the recent autumn Test series and was one of Scotland’s best players during it.Brown felt Glasgow’s basics had gone well but that was perhaps the least to be expected in the circumstances and, when all things were taken into account, – and it was his opposite number who drove his side to respond to their crisis, and receive the man-of-the-match award in the process.

“At scrum time they were down to seven and it was a bit of a mess but we felt we had the edge,” Brown observed.

“The lineout went pretty well. We missed the lift for one ball and that was the only one we lost. So, the set-piece functioned well but it is about what we did with the ball – and we turned it over too many times – knock-ons, missed passes, ruck retention.”

The central message from Glasgow players was, however, that they cannot lose faith in the way they are trying to play and must remind themselves that their methods caused problems for a mighty Montpellier side in the European Champions Cup. in the fortnight that preceded their trip to Murrayfield and simply seek to do things better on the day.

“We had a good training week, had one of our sharpest team runs in the one before the game,” Brown said of the build-up to last weekend’s match.

Brown added: “It is just about performing when we get [to Edinburgh]. Too many times we come here and get sucked into that kind of game, we just don’t play play our game. Rarely did we get into five-plus phases and get into our shape. When we did the ball was slow, they did a good job of slowing out ball down but we are a good enough team to generate quick ball and did not do that.

“We will have to look at ourselves. It will be a pretty hard review week across Christmas and will come down to just hard work [but] I don’t think we do too much different in terms of preparation. We prepared really well, we knew what we wanted to go, just did not execute, did not play our game. We just have to manage the ball, control the ball and cut out those mistakes and get to multi-phase.”

“If we get to multi-phase we will open teams up, we have a brilliant backline, obviously, but also some really powerful runners in the forwards with good skills. We need to get to multi phase to exploit spaces, get some offloads in and get some shoulders to run at.”