Steady as she goes: the traditional order from sea captains applies to the Scotland rugby union team in 2008. Not only was there not a single retirement for Frank Hadden, the coach, after the World Cup, but with a team that has an average age of 26, he can expect most of the players he took to France to be hitting their prime during the 2011 tournament.
It is a rare luxury for any coach. He has the same backroom team and, barring injuries, needs to make few changes in the playing side. He can afford to give himself the time to ease the next generation into the side in a process more akin to evolution in pace and style than the kind of radical surgery seen from, for example, France.
Strangely enough, such a comfortable position heaps pressure on the coach. Out there among the fans, the fact that there are so few changes and that this is a season where the traditional superpowers of European rugby, France and England, have to visit Murrayfield means there are no excuses for failure. The nation expects an impressive stab at silverware.
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The big task for Hadden is working out how to use all that experience while keeping the team fresh after only four players were initially axed from the World Cup squad: Scott Lawson, Craig Smith, Marcus Di Rollo and Scott Murray. There are players making a case week by week in club rugby for elevation to the national squad, and finding the fine line between form and experience is a juggling act.
Nick De Luca, the Edinburgh centre, has been attracting rave reviews all season and will make his mark, while the rest of the back line should be rejigged to move Simon Webster to the wing, his best position. The broken thumb sustained by Simon Taylor means Hadden has to change the World Cup back row, which, as we went to press, suggested he would field a specialist open-side flanker in John Barclay, who won his first cap against New Zealand in the World Cup, instead of relying on a converted No 8.
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Barclay has been Glasgow’s most consistent performer of the season, though it says something for Scotland’s back-row strength that the likes of Johnnie Beattie, Alasdair Strokosch, David Callam and Ross Rennie were unlikely to make the squad, even with Taylor injured.
All of which means that for all his talk of increased competition for places, which is certainly true in the key positions in the back row and at half back, Hadden seemed likely to restrict himself to only two new faces — De Luca and Barclay — for the XV in the opening game.
Last place in the Six Nations last season showed what happens when injury forces radical changes, so this time Hadden will make the changes slowly and cautiously, letting each one bed in before tinkering again.