For the third time this season, Glasgow went down to defeat, missing enough kicks to have reversed the result against Munster. But this time Sean Lineen, the coach, says he could not have been more proud of the way his players performed in adversity at the reopening of Thomond Park.

“In the end, we thoroughly deserved a bonus point, but it was not to be,” he said yesterday, after racing back from the Saturday night match in Limerick to experience life on the other side of the whistle as referee at a mini-rugby tournament in Edinburgh. “I’m proud of the way they stuck in there, they did not give up. It is a good benchmark ahead of the start of the Heineken Cup later this week.”

The fact is that for large chunks of the game, despite conditions that could have been tailor-made for Munster, and the emotion that came with 20,000 cramming themselves into the new-look stadium in Limerick as it opened its doors to the home support for the first time, Glasgow gave as good as they got, before tries from Barry Murphy and Doug Howlett, added to Ronan O’Gara’s two conversions and two penalties, settled the 25-17 win.

Lineen even managed to find a positive in the disastrous opening, Bernardo Stortoni, the full back, going for a quick throw-in a few yards from his own line and Johnnie Beattie dropping the greasy ball to gift the opening try to Peter Stringer, the Munster scrum half. “After that Beattie went on to have a good game. It would have been easy for morale to have suffered but they fought back brilliantly and that says a lot about the spirit in the squad,” Lineen said.

The side could even have gone in front had Colin Gregor kicked all his points. “If the luck is against you, it is against you and there is nothing you can do about it. All the kickers are working as hard as they can and doing everything they can to get it right, we still had chances to score tries — it is a 15-man game and you cannot keep putting it all on one man,” the coach pointed out.

In fact, Gregor could consider himself hard done by, one long-range effort coming back off the crossbar. He missed three penalties but succeeded with four and the late try from Hefin O’Hare, the replacement wing, gave him a chance to earn his side a losing bonus point, only for the touchline conversion attempt to join the list of failures.

O’Hare was on for Thom Evans, the club’s leading try-scorer, who was forced off the field in the first half with a badly gashed lip. Lineen hopes that it will not prove serious enough to keep him sidelined for next Saturday’s match against the Newport Gwent Dragons that opens their Heineken Cup campaign, but admits that it is still too early be certain.

Glasgow need to keep the same battling spirit that they demonstrated in Munster, but to cut out the sloppy mistakes that have gifted scores to their opponents in each of the last four games. The coach knows that while they might get away with errors in the more relaxed atmosphere of the Magners League, there is no way they will get away with them against the likes of Toulouse or Bath, the other European pool opponents.

“These are all one-off games, the players know that everyone is excited about it and that they have to perform at their best if they are to achieve their goals,” he said. “They learnt a lot from last year’s campaign and we are not there to make up the numbers, but to go places. We may be the poor relations, but we don’t have to be a poor team.”