THEY say that winning your first title is always the hardest. As Leicester City and their head coach Claudio Ranieri are about to find out, the pressure racks up week after week as you get closer to your goal. Being in unknown territory can be exhausting as well as exciting, and lots of teams fall short of their destination.

How Vern Cotter and his Scotland squad would love to face the sort of psychological challenge that now confronts Ranieri and Leicester. Never mind winning your first title - for the head coach, winning his first game in the Six Nations Championship is the current big challenge, one that he cannot afford to look beyond as yet.

Positive experience is at a premium for this Scotland squad. Some, like their coach, have not won a Six Nations match at all, never mind contended for a title.

Their defeat by England last weekend followed the loss of all five games in last year’s tournament. That whitewash in Cotter’s first season in charge followed the double defeat under Scott Johnson at the end of the 2014 championship - the 19-17 home loss to France and then the abysmal 51-3 loss to Wales.

For those members of the current squad who were involved in that humiliation in Cardiff, a return to the Welsh capital is unlikely to generate many happy memories, especially as Scotland last won there way back in 2002. But let’s not worry too much about the specific difficulties of winning in Wales: the key issue for Cotter is how to make the transition from promise to any sort of achievement in the Championship.

Finances permitting, at club level, be it in football or rugby, a team that is on the way up but lacks experience can buy in some seasoned campaigners. And as well as finding recruits with experience of winning at the highest level, you can also - just as importantly - bring in players who lack the dispiriting experience of being serial losers.

That latter strategy has been tried by various Scottish football clubs as they tried to mount a challenge to Rangers and Celtic, and to overcome the considerable psychological barrier that exists in the minds of many players. As they grow up, a lot of Scots footballers are conditioned to accept, often unconsciously, that the dominance of the two big Glasgow clubs is the natural order. As a result, those players find it all the harder, psychologically, to see out games against either of them. The answer is to bring in players from abroad who have no such baggage.

In the international game, of course, no national team can recruit players who have already achieved at Test level, because the rules now forbid turning out for more than one country. But Scottish Rugby, in common with other unions, can at least recruit players who have done a lot at the level below internationals, and who have not grown up with that baggage of serial losses which some homegrown players tend to lug around with them.

Step forward WP Nel and John Hardie. Neither the prop from South Africa nor the flanker from New Zealand seems the type to have any psychological weakness when it comes to playing any country against whom Scotland might have an extremely poor recent record.

But the absence of that baggage is only half the battle, of course, with the other half being the absence from those two men’s CVs of a single W in their Six Nations ledger. First capped against Italy in last summer’s Rugby World Cup warm-up match, both Nel and Hardie were making their Six Nations debuts last weekend. They thus joined a lengthening list of Scots who have taken part in the tournament but taken no points home with them.

Jonny Gray was first capped in the autumn of 2013. His only Six Nations appearance in 2014 was as a substitute in the 20-0 home defeat by England. His record in the tournament now is played seven, lost seven.

Finn Russell, Gray’s Glasgow Warriors team-mate, played his first Test in the summer of 2014. He was suspended for last year’s Championship match against Italy, and so has played five, lost five.

Another Glasgow player, Mark Bennett, made his debut in late 2014. His record is played six, lost six.

In short, given Scotland’s last Six Nations win is now almost exactly two years ago - the 21-20 win in Rome on 22 February 2014 - there is a growing number of players within the squad who have yet to experience the pleasure of winning a Championship game. Most have won in Scotland colours, of course, having been a part of the World Cup squad, but their wait for a win in the annual European arm-wrestle goes on.

And the chances of that wait coming to an end at the weekend? Not too high, in all honesty.

It will be over soon, however, and once it does we may then learn just how good this squad can be. But it has already become an agonising wait, one whose end will provoke more relief than celebration.