SCOTLAND captain Greig Laidlaw is set to make his comeback from injury next month and still has hopes of being included in the British & Irish Lions squad for the summer tour to New Zealand. The scrum-half needed surgery on an ankle after being injured in the Six Nations Championship defeat in Paris, but he is confident he can regain match fitness quickly once he returns to club action with Gloucester.

“All being well, I should be back in about four weeks,” he said yesterday. “I’ll be running in the next four, five days hopefully. I need to get back on my feet.

“It’s to get the strength back, get the range back, and once you’ve got that you can crack on. I’ve just had a break for eight weeks. I’ll be flying.”

This weekend’s European Champions Cup and Challenge Cup quarter-finals will be a last chance for players to impress Warren Gatland, but Laidlaw hopes he has done enough in the past to persuade the Lions head coach that he should be part of the squad for the three-Test series against the All Blacks. “Time will tell,” he continued. “They know what I can do. I played well in the Ireland game and that got us off to a good start.”

Scotland won that match and their other two home games in the Six Nations, and although they lost to both France and England away, Laidlaw remains hopeful of a respectable representation in Gatland’s squad, which will be announced in three weeks’ time. “I think we can get a fair few boys on the tour,” he continued. “There’s Hoggy [Stuart Hogg], of course, but there are definitely other payers as well throughout the squad.

“We won three games and at the end we were maybe unlucky to finish fourth. I think we definitely have players in the hunt. You’re looking at Tommy Seymour, Fraser Brown, Jonny and Richie Gray, hopefully myself. WP Nel still, possibly, because he’s a quality player and should just be fit in time for the summer.”