AT LEAST one Scotland player's ambition of spending the summer in New Zealand with the British & Irish Lions has been scuppered. Huw Jones, the South Africa -based centre who was an outside bet for a place in the touring party, has had surgery on the hamstring he tore playing for Scotland against Italy at the weekend.

The player had been due to return to South Africa, where he is under contract to the Stormers franchise in Cape Town until the end of their Super Rugby season, but instead found himself in hospital having the torn muscle repaired.

While he will miss any chance of playing for the Lions this year as well as Scotland's summer tour, it is not even clear whether he will have recovered in time to join Glasgow Warriors for the opening games of next season.

The Stormers believe it will take Jones between four and five months before he is able to return to training – if his return were to be at the longer end of expectations, it would mean he would be unlikely to be match fit before the middle of September.

When he does eventually pull on a Glasgow Warriors shirt, he almost certainly will be joining a club missing one of its long-standing stalwarts in Sean Lamont, the 105-cap Scotland wing. He is reported to have told colleagues that unless the club "beg me to stay" he will be giving up at the end of this season, 14 years after he first joined the club.

The 36-year-old confessed that while experience has been able to cover a lot of gaps in his play, he feels he simply does not have the pace to compete at the highest level any more.

"I have had a great run and enjoyed every single moment but it is time to step aside. I am not going to flog a dead horse, although some might say I've been two years dead anyway!" he was quoted as saying

"I love the sport, I love being in it and I love the guys I work with, but I just don't have the gas anymore. I can't get through those holes I see. I can still truck it up a distance, but there is definitely a blunting of the axe.

"It is disappointing it is coming to the end but I am 36 and I have done pretty well considering. Even if I was just arriving at my peak I don't think I would get in the current side."

Lamont, who was the second-highest capped player when he played his last international as a replacement against Japan last year – he was overtaken by Ross Ford last weekend – has been a mainstay of the national side since was first capped in 2004.

He has enjoyed two spells with Glasgow, joining from Rotherham, but moving after two years, first to Northampton and then to the Scarlets before returning to Scotland in 2012, and going on to complete his 100 games for the club as well as his country.

As one of the most committed and enthusiastic players around, his influence has been clear as young second row, Scott Cummings, who was still in primary school when Lamont signed his first professional contract, explained: "He has been around for a long time and is a very experienced player," he said.

"The number of caps he has won for Scotland speaks volumes about him. Especially over the last Six Nations, he has brought a lot of experience into the squad that helps young guys like me who are pushing to try to progress.

"We have a lot of great leaders in the club, and he is one of them. He has been around the block, been around with a lot of different clubs before coming back to Glasgow. He has played with Scotland for loads of caps. He has experienced lots of different fields of rugby and can bring those different styles and experiences to help us young guys."

All that is for the future, though. Right now, Lamont, Cummings and all the rest of the Glasgow team are concentrating on getting the perfect end to the season that would give them a chance of catching the teams ahead of them in the Guinness PRO12 and making the play-offs.

"There are not too many games left and we are not in the position we want to be," Cummings admitted. "We know that if we play good rugby and stick with what we know we can win games, put more points on and push for the top four, which is where we want to be. We can't think too much long term.

"We have a lot of big games coming up – Connacht, Saracens and Munster. If we focus on next weekend [when they play Saracens in the European Champions Cup quarter final] and forget this weekend, we would lose. We're focusing on Connacht and that is all."