OUR time has come. That has been the message from Scotland’s players this week, and they have every reason to be optimistic about the RBS Six Nations Championship, which begins today with a home match against England.

This is an improving team, and a relatively young team. They have flaws all right, as they showed at last year’s Rugby World Cup - above all in defence, where they conceded a total of 12 tries in their last three matches. But those flaws can be smoothed out, if not altogether eliminated, with practice. The players have shown already that they can learn quickly.

Vern Cotter, who took over as head coach in the summer of 2014, deserves much of the credit for the way in which the squad has improved. The New Zealander had to endure a punishing Six Nations last year as his team lost all five of their games, but he stuck to his task with characteristic stoicism and reaped a modest reward both in the World Cup warm-up matches and then in the tournament itself.

Cotter knows the individuals he wants to be in his team - which is one reason why there are only two differences in today’s starting line-up from the one that took the field in the World Cup quarter-final defeat by Australia - and he knows the style in which he wants them to play.

There is a discernible pattern in the coach’s selections, and a clear direction in which he wants his team to progress. There are no glaring weaknesses in certain areas of the side. Every man of them deserves his jersey.

And yet, needless to say, no team ever progresses in isolation. Improvement can only be gauged by performances against other teams, and right now some of those other teams will also be telling themselves, with equal conviction, that their time has come.

Today’s opponents, for a start, will be confident of putting on a far better show in the Six Nations than they did at the World Cup. Their new coach, Eddie Jones, will have done everything possible to help them enjoy playing rugby again after their humiliation as hosts, and by harping on about the traditional values of an England team he has steadily repaired their self-confidence.

Those traditional values, of course, are based on strength up front - the key ingredient of the best English sides of recent decades, from Martin Johnson’s world champions of 2003 all the way back to Bill Beaumont’s Grand Slam winners of 1980. The encouraging thing from a Scottish perspective, however, is that no matter how competitive the English forwards become under Jones, Cotter has constructed a pack that is more than capable of holding its own.

That is one change we should see today compared to many Calcutta Cup clashes - even ones in which Scotland have either won or come close to getting a result. In the past, Scottish teams have had to counter English bulk with superior speed and intelligence, getting the ball away from the set piece as quick as possible. Now, with WP Nel anchoring the scrum so well and Jonny Gray swiftly maturing into a world-class competitor in the lineout, there is no need to hare off into space. Close-quarter control can be won.

Nathan Hines, the Scotland assistant coach who as a lock knew a lot himself about the battle for set-piece supremacy, answered in the affirmative yesterday when asked if this team is better placed than its predecessors to go toe to toe with England. “I’d say yeah, but it’s only my opinion and we’ll find out tomorrow, won’t we?,” he said. “Together we’ve matured as a squad, and the time spent together has made them more accustomed to each other and what to expect.

“The scrum went well for us [at the World Cup], so we’ll be hoping to consolidate that. England’s scrum isn’t exactly bad and we’ll have a big job to make sure we have parity and look after our own ball.

“But it’s not rocket science, is it? You try and get your forwards in the game, try and win their ball - it’s not a difficult game, is it really?

“We all know applying pressure on the other team is how you get an advantage. England will be trying to do it to us, so it depends on the arm wrestle, on who can create more pressure or relieve the pressure. That’s what it comes down to, and it’s just a question of whether it’s getting up in their faces or any other tactic to put pressure on them. It’s no different than most games.”

In some ways, of course, rugby, like other sports, is more difficult than rocket science - because as well as being about brute force it has to take into account the complexities of the human psyche. Cotter and Hines and the rest of the coaching team have to convince this generation of Scotland players that they can win games against the so-called bigger countries, and that can be a hard thing to do in the case of players who have known nothing but defeat by England.

But that is one advantage of players such as Nel and John Hardie, the openside flanker: they have arrived here, from South Africa and New Zealand respectively, with no Calcutta Cup baggage. They just get on with their job, and that job today will be to get Scotland off to a winning start in the Six Nations for the first time since 2006, when they beat France at Murrayfield.

So can Scotland do it? At the World Cup they were vulnerable early on in their games against Japan and the United States, and vulnerable at the death - fatally so - against Australia. A similar failure to play for 80 minutes today could be punished. But if they play close to their best, and keep their composure throughout, they can win.