THERE have been a few low points in Edinburgh’s season so far, but the nadir was undoubtedly losing to Zebre at Murrayfield for the first time at the end of October. Tomorrow’s match in Parma is therefore a chance to gain a measure of revenge for that shock defeat, and to end a frustrating year on an upbeat note.

On their day, and with their first-choice team on the field, Edinburgh should be too strong for the bottom-of-the-table Italian side, but the trouble is that ‘their day’ does not come regularly enough. Given that inconsistency, it is no surprise that Allan Dell, the loosehead prop, suggested that the important thing was to ensure that they go into the PRO12 match in a positive but by no means presumptuous frame of mind.

“I can say we’re ready and we’ll put them to the sword this time, but that’s words,” said Dell, who played in the 19-14 loss to Zebre two months ago and will start tomorrow, with Alasdair Dickinson being out injured. “It’s our actions that will show that.

“If we turn up on Saturday I’m confident that we’ll do the job, but if we don’t turn up the way of sport nowadays is that you can’t pick it up after ten minutes because the other team has got its head of steam up. So we have to just concentrate on ourselves.

“In that last game we were our own worst enemies. If we play to our structures with the calibre of player we’ve got, and click it together … but that’s been the problem.

“They’ll come at us, because they’re always tough at home, and especially after beating us here they’ll see this as a game to claim the double, so we know if we’re at all off our game it will be a hard 80 minutes. We have to focus on doing what we do best and not think about doing things differently because we lost last week. That way you find yourself in unusual positions. Yes, we know they’re coming at us and we need to be on our game to win.”

The loss to which Dell referred, the 1872 Cup defeat by Glasgow, highlighted both the problems faced and the promise displayed by Edinburgh this season. They had more possession for long spells of the match, and made several threatening line breaks, but lost the try count 3-0 to opponents who made far better use of their chances when they arose.

“You can see what being clinical does for you,” Dell added. “We had opportunities in their half but couldn’t finish it, particularly with good driving maul positions, which just were not clinical enough. When you get points on offer like that you have to take them and that’s what Glasgow did.

“When you’ve got ambitions to play in the Champions Cup and to do well in the PRO12 then you hurt every time you lose, and we know we’ve left ourselves with a bit of a mountain to climb in the 1872 Cup now, but that’s for the end of the season. The focus now is getting back into this one with Zebre this weekend, a different game to Glasgow, and be in the right head space.

“I don’t think any sportsman goes into a game believing you’ll lose - you don’t train every day to be beaten and get embarrassed on a weekend. But you can have a fantastic training session and in the game things don’t go according to plan and you start forcing things and make errors, so instead we have to be more composed and react, to do the right things to win the game.”

The key question, of course - and one that applies to the vast majority of sports teams, not just to Edinburgh - is how to guarantee they will display that composure. “If I knew the answer I’d probably be the best-paid head doctor in the world,” Dell admitted. “You know what it’s like: sometimes you wake up differently some days and you don’t know what the problem is. So you just have to deal with the things you can control and be confident. If every player does his job then you know the man next to you is doing his job and you don’t have to worry about what’s going on elsewhere, which takes away from your own concentration.

“[In October] we had just beaten Harlequins, flying away, then lose to Zebre at home. Fair play, they did well in that game, but then we beat Ulster and that’s the inconsistency I’m talking about. For some reason we’ve struggled over there and I don’t know why that is, but this time we’re going there knowing that we simply have to win this game. If we lose it . . . . I don’t want to think about that.”

Meanwhile Dickinson, who only made his comeback earlier this month after a six-month absence because of a hamstring injury, was having his injury assessed last night. He was replaced by Dell in the first half of Monday’s game after taking a leg knock, and head coach Duncan Hodge declined to offer a prognosis other than to say the injury was not a recurrence of the one that had kept him out for half the year.

“It’s not the same injury,” Hodge confirmed. “That’s as much as I know at present. I’ve no idea how long he could be out for - we’ll just have to wait and see on that.”