RUGBY players will tell you that every time they take to the field, they know it could be the last time they play.
If they are honest, though, they will also admit that little nagging voice at the back of their minds is usually told to shut up, not to be taken too seriously. As he takes to the field tomorrow, however, Dougie Hall knows it is all too true.
The Glasgow Warriors hooker will be in the team to face Cardiff Blues at Scotstoun, but appearances have been few and far between this season and he has already announced that he is retiring at the end of the campaign to start a career with McCrea Financial Services, one of the club's sponsors, so every game really could be his last.
"I did accounts at Uni so having done three years I thought the bits I enjoyed were the finance aspects and I would look to do something in that area," he said, with the connections made in the hospitality suite at the club's ground helping smooth the way from one career to another.
"Now it is the last few games for me. It literally gets to the point where you think 'this may be the last game of professional rugby I get to play, possibly even the last game of rugby'. I don't know what will happen after this year, whether I will dip my toe into amateur, at the moment I don't think I will. So it could be that when I play my last game for Glasgow, that will be it.
"So I'm trying to enjoy it all as much as I can while still staying focussed on achieving Glasgow's goal of winning the league this year. At 34 it is not a shock that you are retiring but you do start to think about the things you enjoy about the game and you start to think about the last huddle, the last chance to walk out of the team room together. It is those moments I will miss - incredibly.
"Nothing will every replicate that for me but I have been lucky that I have got to do it for so many years. I have to hold onto the memories."
Like Al Kellock, the club captain, who made his retirement announcement last week, Hall made the transit from Edinburgh to Glasgow at a time when the side in the east were seen as Scotland's dominant club, and Glasgow a bit of a disaster area, so it has been gratifying for him to see the side grow and flourish in the years he has been across in the west.
Now the aim is to go out on a high. If things go according to plan, the season should finish with the Guinness PRO12 final in Belfast at the end of May, and though Hall is honest enough to realise he may not be involved in the match-day squad, he has been involved this season. If his teammates can do him a big enough favour, he would get to make lifting the trophy his final act in rugby.
It is up to the players like him, to get everything right. "Slowly, bit by bit, the SRU have been taking away all the excuses," Hall pointed out. "When I first started, we were bussing down to Wales the day before the game and you were thinking 'how are we supposed to win after a journey like that'. Compared to then, a lot of the excuses have been removed and that is part of the reason we are doing so much better.
"The pressure now is the right pressure; the kind that comes from knowing you have been pout on an equal footing and can say 'lets go out there and show what we can do'. Ask any player and they will say that is what they want, an opportunity to go out there on an even footing and show what they have got."
Strength in depth comes at a price for a player like Hall. With Fraser Brown in Scoland's Six Nations squad, Pat MacArthur close to it and Kevin Bryce making his Test debut last summer, the openings have been few and far between for Hall, so that tomorrow will be just his second start of the season along with a handful of games off the bench.
"When you look at where we have got to. Four out of the last five seasons we have been in the semi finals, competing, slowly but surely going through the process where you have to lose a couple eventually to win one," he said. "I am hoping that we are the end of that process, but it has been a hard road to get to where we are now."
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