Wales, England and Scotland (the Scots had got up at 6am to take a separate flight from Pretoria) had to rush back to the airport.After suffering a delay on the runway, the Scots arrived back at their hotel in Pretoria at 7.30pm. “It was equivalent to flying to Tenerife and back for lunch,” said one player. Duncan Paterson, the Scotland team manager, said: “Logistically the occasion was not in the interests of anybody.” It is not for nothing that Scotland are sponsored by The Famous Grouse.The Springboks had done their best to make them feel at home, issuing all the visiting players with a printed message: “On behalf of our union and on behalf of our country, with joy in our hearts, we welcome you to South Africa. Through the coming days and nights of this great festival you will see how powerfully the World Cup has pulled our fledgling nation together and why we can properly greet you as one team representing one country.”Meanwhile, Bill McLaren, the BBC’s voice of rugby, will be heard but not seen at this World Cup. ITV bought the exclusive television rights but McLaren’s rich Borders brogue will grace the airwaves for BBC radio.

However, the veteran commentator was far from happy when he discovered that the entire French three-quarter line had shaved their heads. As they all look like convicts, it will make player identification a hair-raising experience.. These have been a remarkably revivalist past six months for Scottish rugby and it is perhaps time to invite a sense of moderation, a tempering of elation as Scotland await their fate in Group D of the World Cup. In which case there is no one better qualified than Jim Telfer, former captain and coach and latterly the Scottish Rugby Union’s full-time director of rugby, to oblige: “We were never as bad as most people made us out to be, and we’re nowhere near as good as those same people are now saying.”
If the grudging Telfer and his typically hard-nosed remark do nothing else, they will ensure that the Scots appreciate they will need a performance at least as good as that which carried them to victory in Paris last season when they play the conclusive pool game against France in Pretoria on Wednesday week.Whether they have it in them is arguable at best, not least because of the succession of training injuries that have afflicted them here in South Africa, and reliant at least as much on the unpredictability of the French as on their own, still uncertain quality. But the very fact that the Scots are given a chance now shows how far things have changed within six months.This relates to the men as well as the mood.

Last November Scotland’s trouncing by South Africa at Murrayfield was their ninth successive game without a win and, having in the aftermath of that calamity said they stood by their dispirited players, the selectors then repudiated two-thirds of them the next time they had a choice to make.What at the time smacked of panic became perfect perception when a team with 10 changes produced victories over Canada, Ireland, France and Wales. By the time of Scotland’s Grand Slam decider at Twickenham the very least that could be said of them was that they had become highly committed and competitive.Commonplace as these attributes may sound, they will prove – or should do, at any rate – substantial virtues in this World Cup, particularly as the French have no idea whether it will be their dark or their light side that is about to be exposed on the high veldt.The dark is their dismal form of the Five Nations, the light the combination of vivacity – essentially Gallic – and unbendable determination – more Anglo-Saxon really – that carried them to their series wins in New Zealand last year and, a year earlier, here in South Africa. These were achievements that would be beyond the capacity of the Scots.The pool runners-up can already confidently expect to meet New Zealand, rather than the preferred alternative of Ireland or Wales, in the quarter- finals and though France in the mood might just confound the All Blacks once more, this would be difficult to imagine of Gavin Hastings’ side, rejuvenated as they may be.That said, they have travelled a long way from the despair that prevailed before Christmas when even Tonga (though never the Ivory Coast, their first opponents on Friday) were starting to loom as an insurmountable obstacle. Douglas Morgan, the coach, has subsequently defended his selection but the 20/20 vision of hindsight shows that the team who crumbled against the Springboks were crucially weaker than they should have been.You need only look at Rob Wainwright’s influence during the Five Nations’ Championship to realise that, if he was fit enough to be worth a place against South Africa for Scotland A (who won), then so he was for the Test itself.