FINALLY, possibly for the first time but hopefully not the last, Glasgow Warriors and Edinburgh Rugby can look forward to this afternoon's European draws with some justifiable optimism.

As PRO12 winners, Glasgow are one of the three top seeds in the Champions Cup; as Challenge Cup runners-up and in the second group of seeds in that tournament this time, Edinburgh can reflect on how close they came last season. Both now know precisely what it takes to beat the continent's best.

It was all so different a couple of decades ago, when the early years of cross-border competition in the newly-professionalised sport caused little but grief for Scotland's representatives. They invariably failed to get beyond the pool stages, and when the first of them did - Glasgow in 1997 - it was only to suffer a record defeat.

The gulf in standards between our teams and their English and Welsh rivals may have been partly caused by the fact that, while those two countries had been quietly preparing for professionalism for some time, the Scottish Rugby Union, at least in its public utterances, had resisted it to the last. But whatever the cause, the gulf was there all right, being laid bare in the first ever foray into the new European competitions by a Scots side, Edinburgh's visit to Bath for a Heineken Cup tie in the autumn of 1996.

Captained by Scott Hastings, and with other international-class backs such as Derrick Lee and Duncan Hodge, Edinburgh lost 55-26 to the West Country club. Besides their own union internationals, Bath had two recruits from rugby league in their ranks.

By the start of the following year Scotland would have welcomed back the invaluable Alan Tait from the 13-a-side code, but that autumn there was no denying that England's leading clubs had adapted to the sport's new conditions far more quickly. While they trained together as Edinburgh, Glasgow, Caledonia or the Borders a couple of times a week, Scotland's players were still essentially club men, as Hodge recalled recently.

"My main memory of that time was we were coming together as a district team and training at night time," the Scotland assistant coach said. "So we were going into that competition as a district team against a team that was used to training together four or five times a week.

"Playing against guys we'd never played before, like Mike Catt, Jeremy Guscott, Henry Paul and Jason Robinson, was just amazing. On the day there was a big difference between the teams, because they were full-time and training together, while we were trying to cobble together a couple of sessions a week. Playing against that Bath team was on a different plane to anything we'd experienced up till then."

A few months earlier, Bath had undergone a similarly traumatic baptism of fire, when they played a cross-code double-header against Wigan, the outstanding rugby league team of the time. The professionals were faster, slicker, fitter, and won the league leg 82-6. Bath had a measure of revenge under their own rules, when they won 44-19, but it was obvious that union, despite decades of denial, had an awful lot to learn from league.

Edinburgh lost all four of their pool games that season, incidentally, as did Caledonia, while the Borders won once, at home to Llanelli. Taking part in the subsidiary Challenge Cup competition, Glasgow also recorded a solitary victory, at Newbridge in Wales.

Having graduated to the main event the following year, Glasgow made it through their pool as runners-up to Wasps, and thus qualified for the quarter-final play-offs. They needn't have bothered, as all they got for their pains was the abject humiliation of losing 90-19 to Leicester.

Edinburgh were just as capable, if that is the right word, of losing heavily, and in their case the Welsh-Scottish League was the setting for some heavy reverses. The nadir came in late 2000, when they went down 80-16 in Cardiff then 69-20 in Swansea, but for a while it felt like any Welsh village side - not only those big city clubs - was a threat to the team from Scotland's capital. There was even a suggestion around that time that the Manic Street Preachers had a request to play at Murrayfield turned down by the SRU on the grounds that they would probably win.

Matters did improve thereafter, but only sporadically. Edinburgh at last reached the quarter-finals in 2003-04, only to be beaten by Toulouse, and it was another eight years before they went a stage further, reaching the last four before losing to Ulster.

The big difference now is that, at least towards the end of the season just past, both Glasgow and Edinburgh were playing consistently well. Granted, neither the PRO12 nor the Challenge Cup is at the standard of the Champions Cup, but both Scottish teams do, at least and at last, appear to have solid foundations in place that will help them take on the best in Europe. Although, as ever, a bit of good luck in the draws would not go amiss.