Franco Smith confirms Huw Jones and Zander Fagerson will miss start of season with injuries

Glasgow Warriors boss Franco Smith has revealed that injured stars Huw Jones and Zander Fagerson will miss the start of the new season.

The Scotstoun club returns to action with a friendly against Northampton on Friday night.

Smith, who recently signed a new deal that will keep him at the Warriors until 2028, couldn’t put a time frame on when the Scotland internationals will return, but says both will miss the first part of the new campaign.

Speaking to STV Sport, he said: “It looks like both (Zander and Huw) of them are going to be out for the first part of the season, Zander’s is a bit of a setback, it’s a completely different injury, maybe due to the rehab that he’s done that could have inflamed his knee, without making any big predictions on when he will return, he will probably miss the first couple of games at least.

“Huw has a chronic Achilles problem. He played over the summer with the Lions and had a lot of training, so the sooner we get that chronic pain away, the better it is for us.

“Therefore, I don’t think he will be available for the first part of the season either.”

There was some good news for Warriors fans with Jack Dempsey returning to action after seven months out.

Smith said: “We are really excited to see Jack out there, especially after the injury troubles that he’s had. Being injured over the pre-season break is always bad news for the players because you have to keep on working and don’t really get as much time away as you want.

“But he stuck with the plan and worked really hard, so we are really excited for him.”

Glasgow get their competitive season under way against the Sharks on September 26, and Smith says that the seasons “flow into each other” following a short break.

He said: “The seasons do flow into each other now, the internationals only finished on July 19, the Lions finished up on August 2, so it has been a short break for them, but we’ve managed them well and they have all managed at least four or five weeks away from the game, and in that period they don’t really decondition, so to get the conditioning back up to speed is a continuous work for us anyway so doesn’t really matter for us.

“This is the fourth pre-season for me here, so the players all know what is expected, and they are all ready to be the hunters this year rather than the hunted.

“We want to be continually successful here, and we want to influence the wider community with that. I want the players to be the heroes of this town for the right reasons, and that will make this group special.”