Last week 31 players were given the chance to play their way into Scottish rugby history when they were named in the squad for the forthcoming World Cup.
In the professional era, performance at this global event is increasingly how players’ status in the game is being judged; but it was not always so.
Tasked with identifying the 50 best players to have represented Scotland since the first-ever international match 144 years ago, I was confronted with a list of names that, when Mike Cusack was capped against Ireland last month, had reached 1067.
While even he could not cover half the period on the basis of personal memory I was consequently grateful to the venerable Bill McMurtrie for his assistance, after extensive wider consultation, in making the final decisions. 
Between us, apart from a three-year period in the mid-nineties when Derek Douglas had the helm, we occupied the role of chief rugby writer at The Herald for close to half a century – Bill having taken on the job in 1966 – and, of course, we had access to HeraldSport’s incomparable archive.
On the face of it the selections made by the managements of the British & Irish Lions should have offered a significant clue since, with more than 1000 men having represented Scotland since the first Test at Edinburgh’s Raeburn Place in 1871, the job of identifying the best of the best to wear the navy blue ought to have been at least partly done since little more than 100 have gone on Lions tours and fewer still have been selected for Lions Test teams. 
Yet, while those lists offered useful pointers, many great international players missed out on those jaunts for a variety of reasons, particularly during the amateur era when the capacity to find the time to take part in gargantuan tours was a factor.
The other task, of course, is the near impossible one of comparing players from different eras, particularly those whose careers took place beyond living memory.
Ultimately – by way of a teaser ahead of the final countdown at the end of the week – our top five alone includes players who won Lions Test series; played in Lions Tests but never won; toured but never made the Lions Test side; and who never even went on a Lions tour. 
It is acknowledged, of course, that subjectivity is inevitably at play when judging performances and, in many cases, merely reputations, so there should be plenty of scope for discussion as the full list of 50 is unveiled in the next few days. 

50 John Bannerman 
(1921-29) Glasgow HSFP, Oxford University
Honours: 37 Scotland caps, one Grand Slam, four Five Nations Championship wins, four Calcutta Cup wins.
What set him apart? The Glaswegian, who made his debut as a teenager, was ultimately to set a new Scottish appearance record with a cap haul that was remarkable by the standards of the time, perhaps placed in perspective by the fact that he did not miss a match between debut and retirement but had 10 different second row partners. Considered to be the outstanding forward between the two World Wars, he played a significant part in one of the greatest periods in Scottish rugby history which included claiming a first-ever Grand Slam in 1925. After their run of three successive championship wins was interrupted in 1928 he took over the captaincy in his final season to lead the side to yet another title in his final season in 1929.

49 Charles Reid 
(1881-88) Edinburgh Accies
Honours: 20/21 Scotland caps, three Home International Championship wins, one Calcutta Cup win.
What set him apart? The first ever schoolboy forward to appear in an international match on making his debut against Ireland and still, along with Ninian Finlay, the youngest player ever to represent Scotland (both were 17 years and 36 days old) he was considered a huge figure at 6’3” and between 15 and 16 stones. Only 24 when he retired from international rugby he had set a then Scottish record of 19 or 20 international appearances (depending on whether the first meeting with Ireland in 1885 which was abandoned after half an hour is included), captaining his country in four of his last five matches and running in four tries, a formidable strike rate for a forward in any era. Again depending on whether that Test in Belfast is included he was also on the winning side either 12 or 13 times, losing on only four occasions.

48 David Rollo 
(1959-68) Howe of Fife
Honours: 40 Scotland caps, one Five Nations Championship win, two Calcutta Cup wins, one Lions tour. 
What set him apart? A farmer from the decidedly unfashionable Howe of Fife club, he was a model of rugged reliability. So much so that of the 42 Test matches played between his debut in the drawn match against England at Twickenham in 1959 and his last appearance against Ireland in 1968, he missed only two. Indeed, local legend around Cupar maintains that he could have gone on longer but the Scottish selectors of the time did not want someone from their little club to surpass the national cap record held by a man from much more prestigious Hawick, his long time front-row colleague Hugh McLeod. Conspiracy theories or no conspiracy theories the pair played a huge part in giving Scotland a platform on which to rebuild after the misery of the fifties.

47 Nathan Hines 
(2000-2011) Edinburgh Reivers, Edinburgh, Perpignan, Leinster, Clermont Auvergne, Sale Sharks.
Honours: 77 Scotland caps, two Calcutta Cup wins, Heineken Cup winner with Leinster, one Lions tour.
What set him apart? Universally known as “Wagga” in honour of his home town in Australia, the adopted Scot, who arrived in Gala on a life-changing “walkabout” year in 1998 and has hardly stopped touring Europe since, is as pleasant a character off the field as he is unpleasant to face on it. A renowned short fuse which contributed to him being the first man to be red carded when representing Scotland in a Test has been considered a weakness but is indicative of a fiercely competitive nature while he also boasts astonishing subtlety for one so combative his off-loading a product of having learned his trade in rugby league. After a Test debut against the All Blacks as a late replacement on Scotland’s tour in 2000 he took time to establish himself in the squad and opted out for a while during fellow Aussie Matt Williams’ time in charge, but in a career that has gone on and on has never lacked commitment once he takes the field.

46 Herbert Waddell 
(1924-30) Glasgow Accies
Honours: 15 Scotland caps, one Grand Slam, three Five Nations Championship wins, three Calcutta Cup wins, one Lions tour (three Test appearances). 
What set him apart? The playmaker in Scotland’s first Grand Slam winning side of 1925 who had the task of getting the fabled Oxford three-quarter line moving during a run that saw them successfully defend the title in each of the following two seasons. A match winning try against Wales in 1926, offering a dummy before slicing through the opposition defence, perhaps best exemplified the threat he carried himself while five drop goals in only 15 Scotland Tests represented a remarkable strike rate. His status had been confirmed right at the start of his career when, still only 21, he played three of the four Lions Tests in South Africa in 1924, the year he had won his first cap for Scotland.

45 Bruce Hay 
(1975-81) Boroughmuir
Honours: 23 Scotland caps, one Lions tour (three Test appearances).
What set him apart? So good as a last line of defence that Andy Irvine was shifted to the wing to accommodate him, Hay was famously teased by Jim Renwick for scoring the first try he had watched live and in slow motion at the same time. His abilities were certainly better suited to full-back than wing, but it speaks volumes that the Scotland selectors would rather swap the two great Edinburgh back three men around than leave either out of the side. The same applied to the Lions once Irvine arrived as a late replacement on the 1980 tour of South Africa; and both performed admirably with the late Clem Thomas perhaps best summing Hay up with his simple description of the Boroughmuir man in his official history of the Lions as “a hundred-per-cent player if ever there was one.”

44 Mark Morrison 
(1896-1904) Royal HSFP
Honours 23 Scotland caps, two Triple Crowns, four Calcutta Cup wins, one Lions tour (three Test appearances). 
What set him apart? Clearly identified as an exceptional talent from an early age, Morrison was first capped as an 18-year-old and, at the age of just 21, was captaining his country. In an eight-year career that might have brought around 80 caps in modern times he was a powerful forward who would lead Scotland in 15 of his 23 Tests in all and also captained the Lions in all three Test appearances for them. That 1903 tour perhaps marks the measure of the man as a leader since, for all that they were the first Lions to lose a series in South Africa, they had lost seven of 16 matches on that tour before the first Test yet remarkably took it to the final match after two drawn matches before losing a hard fought decider 8-0.

43 Gordon Bulloch 
(1997-2005) West of Scotland, Glasgow Caledonians, Glasgow
Honours: 75 Scotland caps, one Five Nations Championship win, two Lions tours (two Test appearances).
What set him apart? In an era which saw only three Scots selected in the initial party for each tour, Bulloch’s achievement in making Test appearances for the Lions against both the Wallabies and the All Blacks in 2001 and 2005 – the only Scot to do on either tour – were particularly creditable. An athletic hooker who worked particularly well with long-standing second-row combination Scott Murray and Stuart Grimes to provide a decent supply of ball to a back division that all too often struggled to make much of it, those appearances were reward for his consistency during a difficult era for Scotland. His leadership ability was also recognised at club level by Glasgow, at international level by Scotland and on the second of those Lions tours when he captained the “dirt-trackers” side. 

42 Gregor Townsend 
(1993-2003) Gala, Northampton, Brive, Castres, Borders
Honours: 82 Scotland caps, one Five Nations Championship win, one Calcutta Cup win, one Lions tour (two Test appearances, one series win). 
What set him apart? Ian McGeechan claimed his brilliance would only be recognised when he was gone, but a decade on there is still a Marmite element to the man debatably credited with inventing “the Toony flip”. Perhaps that moment which allowed Gavin Hastings to end 26 years of Scottish waiting for a win in Paris happened too early in his career in raising expectations as it did. There were other great highlights, of course, such as his disciplined performances between Matt Dawson and Jeremy Guscott in the 1997 Lions Test wins over the Springboks and more typically flamboyant showings when scoring tries in every match, including the friendly against Italy, as Scotland claimed their most recent title 16 years ago. 

41 Al McHarg
(1968-79) West of Scotland, London Scottish
Honours: 44 Scotland caps, five Calcutta Cup wins.
What set him apart? Until very recently the Ayrshireman was the most capped Scottish player never to have gone on a Lions tour. That was perhaps partly down to timing as he was part of a generation that also included Willie John McBride, Broon frae Troon and Bill Beaumont. However, it probably also spoke to the Lions management’s inability to work out how best to accommodate his unorthodoxy. Scotland’s selectors had no such problems with an exceptional athlete whose capacity to read the game repeatedly saw him turn up where least expected in either defence or attack. Winning most of his caps out of London Scottish he could also take particular satisfaction from being a member of one of only four Scottish teams ever to win at Twickenham, just along the road from his club’s home ground in Richmond.