Having always been among the more ambassadorial figures within Scottish professional rugby Mike Blair’s candid assessment of his time in the sport was typical as he officially announced his retirement yesterday.

His has been a fine career during which he represented his country 85 times, 14 as captain and prior to his former under-study Greig Laidlaw’s nomination this season, he was the only Scot ever to have been among the nominees for the World Rugby Player of the Year award.

As he moves into coaching he acknowledges, though, that this has been a grim era for the domestic game even if, as has tended to be his way since former Glasgow head coach Sean Lineen identified his talent as a schoolboy and brought him to Boroughmuir, he seeks to project an optimistic outlook.

“It’s funny because Scottish rugby there’s been… it’s sort of coincided with my career that it’s been a fairly tough period,” he admitted.

“But there’s always green shoots out there and certainly at the moment with the Scottish team there’s a strength in depth coming through that we’ve not had.”

He knows, too, that we have all heard that countless times previously during his 15 year involvement in the professional game and increasingly the evidence is that it is the decline of the Pro12 that is the biggest factor in the Warriors’ success in that competition given that they have not finished in the top half of a European pool for four years.

All the more reason, then, for Blair to look back on involvement with Edinburgh teams that reached the knockout stages in Europe in both 2005 and 2012 as career highlights.

“Scotland, captaining my country, the England home game in 2008 was the first game I captained at home… beating Australia away from home. There are a few things,” he reflected, before identifying reaching the Heineken Cup semifinal with Edinburgh as ‘the big one’.“I think there were 38,000 at that (2012) quarter-final at Murrayfield against Toulouse, so as an event it was exceptional. I scored an upside down try as well. I actually loved playing in the semi-final in Dublin against Ulster.

“It was maybe an opportunity lost there. We were always two scores behind, but that as an occasion, playing with your club in front of 40,000 people in a neutral venue was something really special.”

Very much a product of rugby in the capital he has been impressed, too, by what he has encountered since heading along the M8 this season following a few years broadening his experience with Brive in the French Championship, then Newcastle in the English Premiership.

“The crowd’s something here that’s blown me away,” he said.

“Seventy per cent of the games have been sell-outs. The noise we get here is just incredible. It just gives you that extra boost so that’s something I’ll certainly miss from here.”

His time spent in Glasgow allied to the wide experience he has, including playing a part in the two most successful European campaigns by Scottish teams, may prove crucial in taking the Warriors to the next level and Blair indicated that he is interested in becoming a head coach, though not without reservations.

“You want to aim as high as you can,” he said.

“(However) I read an article a couple of years ago with Ewan McKenzie when he was with the Queensland Reds, he was the head coach but found that only about 30 percent of what he was doing was coaching.

“I met with (former Scotland forwards coach, now Worcester director of rugby) Dean Ryan last year and he was asking about my aspirations and said, 'be careful what you wish for, because there are lots of different parts to the role and make sure that you know what you want to do and what you are good at before you out all your eggs in one basket.’ So next year I'll be trying a few different things and learning off people and hopefully doing the best job I can.”