ONE Scotland prop, Allan Dell, will be winning his first cap against Australia tomorrow. The other, Zander Fagerson, will be winning his second. It therefore comes as no surprise, given that lack of experience at Test level, that Vern Cotter expects the Wallabies to attack his team in the set piece.

At their most attractive, the tourists play what the Scotland coach calls “helter-skelter rugby”, but he has seen them evolve a different style over the last few months and expects that evolution to continue at Murrayfield. “They’ve intensified their forward play and they want to be able to play set-piece rugby,” Cotter said. “They want to play helter-skelter rugby at times too, but this is going to be a set-piece battle, I think.”

Fagerson has been recognised for years as the country’s most promising tighthead prop, while Dell has been on the verge of national honours before and has consistently impressed while playing for Edinburgh this season. Yet notwithstanding those virtues, it is highly probable that Alasdair Dickinson and WP Nel would have been in the team instead of them but for injury, for this match if not for the two Autumn Tests to follow against Argentina and Georgia. Cotter therefore has to hope that the two young props rise to the occasion, and that the likes of hooker Ross Ford, for whom this will be his 100th cap, can help them settle in.

“They've got to get started sometime,” he said when asked if their lack of experience was a concern. “This is an opportunity to get started. These days are always going to happen.

“We've prepared as well as we can, need to give the boys confidence, back them up, get them out there and we'll assess it after. From there we'll move forward - but you've got to start at some stage.

“It’s nice to see an old head like [Ford] playing his 100th game, and he’s putting arms round one guy who’s winning his first cap and another who’s winning his second. He’s going to have to keep them moving from phase to phase - don’t get caught up in something that happened two minutes ago, just do your job. Stay in it together.”

Huw Jones, selected at outside centre, also has just one previous appearance, but has fared well against Australian opposition in Super Rugby, according to Cotter. Hamish Watson is preferred to John Hardie at openside and will make his third appearance, while the bench also includes two players, Ali Price and Rory Hughes, at the start of their international careers. Hughes, the Warriors winger, has one cap, while scrum-half Price, also of Glasgow, is uncapped. Both men were part of a small group who had been invited to train with the national squad but were not expected to come into consideration, only for their form in training to have persuaded Cotter they deserved to be included.

Price is preferred to Henry Pyrgos, who “wasn’t 100 per cent at the end of last week”, the coach added. Watson is preferred to Hardie, his Edinburgh team-mate, on form, while Hughes owes his elevation to the bench to the absence of Tommy Seymour, who is unavailable for personal reasons. Sean Maitland and Tim Visser are the starting wings.

Dickinson, who had hoped to be involved this weekend, is one of three squad members omitted because of injury, Josh Strauss and Duncan Taylor being the others. It is as yet unclear whether they will be available for the following two matches.

Asked once more about whether he and his squad saw this game as change to avenge last year’s Rugby World Cup quarter-final defeat by the Wallabies, Cotter insisted that would be counter-productive. “That’s one of those traps you can fall into, is work on the principle of revenge. No, it’s another game, it’s a year on, and there were things we took from that game that we felt we could use to become better.

“This is gives us another opportunity. It’s not the same team - it’s Australia, but it’s not the same team that we played against. We’ve got different players out on the paddock as well.

“To be perfectly honest, we haven’t looked at any footage of that,” he continued, referring to the game at Twickenham which the Wallabies won by a single point thanks to a last-minute penalty erroneously awarded by the referee. “We looked at footage straight after the game and for a couple of games following it, but we haven’t looked at it for this one.

“[Australia have] moved on a lot since then, and during the Rugby Championship. They’ve improved, they’ve put 30 points on Wales, so we know they’re coming here with a lot of confidence. They like to see themselves as an open, running team, but we expect a set-piece battle before anything. With the weather perhaps closing in a little bit, this gives them the opportunity to go to a more forward-orientated Northern Hemisphere type of game.”

Scotland (v Australia at Murrayfield tomorrow, 2.15pm): S Hogg (Glasgow); S Maitland (Saracens), H Jones (Stormers), A Dunbar (Glasgow), T Visser (Harlequins); F Russell (Glasgow), G Laidlaw (Gloucester); A Dell, R Ford (both Edinburgh), Z Fagerson (Glasgow), R Gray (Toulouse), J Gray (Glasgow), J Barclay (Scarlets), H Watson (Edinburgh), R Wilson (Glasgow). Substitutes: F Brown, G Reid (both Glasgow), M Low (Exeter), G Gilchrist, J Hardie (both Edinburgh), A Price, P Horne, R Hughes (all Glasgow).