Their job? Well, to select. They sifted through the dozens of candidates playing for a dozen teams and worked out who were the best and what was the optimum combination.

As Andy Robinson, the Scotland head coach, scoured the country in a desperate search for Scottish props with four functioning limbs, he must have envied those days. He would have loved to make choices, not simply list a training squad that, in some positions, was nothing more than a list of all the eligible players who had escaped the clutches of their clubs' medical teams. If you're fit, you're in became the motto, for the front row in particular.