It was a piece of trademark Hamish Watson play at Myreside on Friday evening in the second half of Edinburgh’s meeting with the Dragons. A perfectly executed tackle, it was hard to discern whether the Scotland flanker even went to ground in making it as he stripped the ball from his opponent. At which point the referee’s arm went up. Penalty to Dragons.

The realisation was immediate that this was the latest reinterpretation of ruck law in action. Rather than the tackler being at liberty to claim possession immediately on regaining his feet he must now retreat to his own team’s side of the ball and, before competing for it, come back through the imaginary gate, the dimensions of which, it must be said, have always seemed to vary from official to official. The worry had to be that this was early evidence that one of the greatest strengths of one of Scotland’s best players had been diluted if not eliminated, but Watson seems undaunted.

“It was a bit annoying, but it’s just one of those things you have to get on with,” he said. “The new rule is that you can’t pop up after you make the tackle, you’ve got to go back through the gate to compete for ball. So it’s a minor change. Every seven it’s going to stop part of their game, but it’s like almost every year there’s a new ruck rule to try to quicken up the game. That’s a good thing in a way. It’s going to encourage teams to play more with quicker ball to attack off. So it’s good for the attack, good for the fans to watch, but if you’re a jackal or a stealer I think the sevens will just have to adapt a bit more to it.”

Nor is Watson about to give up on his art without a fight.

“I think they’ll still go both ways, it’s not going to be perfect every time and obviously most players never think it’s a penalty if it’s given against them, but I think most sevens will have to adapt to that new rule that you’re just going to have to spin round the gate and it’s just something players will have to get used to,” he observed. “You’ll also just have to read the ref… test it out once and if you get penalised for it then you know not to do it again, so you’re just going to have to see what you can get away with I think.”

That is the sort of pragmatism that might be expected to win the approval of his new head coach Richard Cockerill on whose books he has been before, albeit as an academy player at Leicester who had little direct exposure to the head coach. Even so he could draw on that experience to know what to expect when the man who, as a coach, steered the Tigers to back-to-back English Premiership victories after a trophy laden career as a player and he has not been disappointed.

“When I was involved the culture he tried to bring to the academy with his academy coach would be the same as Leicester first team, so I sort of know what he likes and how he works and you can see that being brought over to Edinburgh a bit at the moment,” said Watson.

“It’s a good thing... we’re changing for the better at Edinburgh and not just on the rugby pitch but off it as well with the culture of the club. Having a pre-season with Cockerill’s been massive so he can drive the standards and what he wants to drive during those sessions. He’s not brought in loads of superstars or loads of players who played with him at Leicester or anything like that. The players have always been there, we’ve always had the ability. He’s brought in one or two, but it’s more just changing attitudes around training, changing the mentality of wanting to train and changing the culture of the club a bit, driving standards and not only the coach driving standards but also getting the player group to do that as well.”

The good thing is that Watson already has enough on his plate in that regard, competing directly with an import brought into the Scottish game a few years ago in John Hardie and he grudgingly accepts that having to do so can be good for the team.

“As a pro player everyone wants to play every week (but) obviously that’s not always possible and the depth we’ve got in our squad, especially in the back-row at the moment I think there is going to be a bit of a rotation system, not just between me and Hards but between a lot of the back-rowers, just because we have the depth to do it,” he noted. “It works both ways. If you get rested or put on the bench one week you’re fresher for the week after. On the other hand when you’re playing you quite like to build momentum as well and sometimes the only way you can do that is by starting a few on the bounce, but when you’ve got the depth we have it’s hard to that and for everyone to be starting every week when there’s only three spots up for grabs.”

Internal competition may meanwhile be all the more important this week in the wake of Edinburgh’s first setback under Cockerill on Friday night, not that Watson’s past experience will be necessary to help him and his colleagues conclude that a challenging week’s training lies ahead.