KENNY MURRAY says the media fixation on the future of Glasgow Warriors head coach Dave Rennie and his potential move to take charge of Australia is not connected to the club's slow start to the season.

"It is not affecting anything, coaches or players," said the Glasgow assistant coach. "It seems the media know more about things than the coaching and management team.

"Dave [Rennnie] made it clear last week that he is here to the end of the season and that is not going to change. It is up to him to talk about what happens after that.

"As far as any of us are concerned, we are not looking beyond that."

So, as they prepare to welcome back DTH van der Merwe and a number of the Scotland World Cup players, the Warriors are more focused on putting right the failings that have resulted in just one win from their four opening games.

For all that, the return of the international contingent will give the team a lift and the players themselves are eager to get back into action at club level.

"Some started training last week, even though they weren’t playing at the weekend, and some more are back in training this week," Murray revealed.

"Out there today, we had guys like George Horne, Pete Horne, Adam Hastings, George Turner and Zander, and they are all available for selection.

"Then we have another group of guys who played a lot of game time in the World Cup and they’ll maybe come back in the week after, for the Zebre game.

"It will be a more of drip than them all coming back in at once.

"Sometimes it is a bit of a relief to get away from that international pressure. The guys are all looking to get back in and get back playing.

"Sam Johnson is not available for another week but is doing a bit of training to get himself ready.

"They [the Scotland players] will be disappointed at the outcome, not getting to the quarter-final, but the thing about rugby is you have to put things behind you pretty quickly because you have another game in a few days."

And they know they have a key role in lifting the performance levels from the opening few games as they take on the Southern Kings at Scotstoun on Friday, though Murray rejected the idea their absence was any excuse for the early-season failings.

"Look at last year, we spoke a lot about how well we did in those [international] windows. We took 19 out of 20 points in the [Six Nations] window, so we’ve not got any excuses about guys being away at the World Cup," he pointed out.

"We’ve played well with guys away before. We’ve just not performed as well as we’ve needed to in the first four games.

"At the weekend we just didn’t exert the pressure when we needed to.

"We have no excuses about the international guys being away. The guys we had on the pitch were good enough to win at the Dragons at the weekend.

"We went down there full of optimism and we’re very frustrated with how we played.

"We just couldn’t get any continuity in our attack, we spilled the ball far too often, we got ourselves into good positions – we made six line-breaks in the game but only got on the end of one of them to put any pressure on.

"Those parts of our game were just very disappointing."