Rusty or rested after a three-week lay-off ...

which will France be tomorrow? The answer may well lie in the way Scotland start the RBS 6 Nations encounter at Murrayfield because it is an imponderable for all concerned, including the French team, until the match begins.

Such is the psychology of sport that, as with confidence, the way players feel in terms of match readiness is very much in their heads and will be affected by how the game goes early on.

Scotland intend to play at a pace that will, if they get it right, have the big French front five in particular gasping for air from the opening exchanges.

Get it wrong by failing to secure much in the way of possession, dropping the ball repeatedly at opponents' feet or allowing themselves to be knocked off it at the breakdown and, as they did in the Stade de France last year, France will eviscerate Scotland through brute force allied to lethally incisive attacks.

Central to the Scottish game plan are a couple of pairings that are relatively unorthodox but have worked well in the past. John Barclay and Ross Rennie are both far too young to remember how John Jeffrey and Finlay Calder tormented opponents when marauding around Murrayfield in the late 1980s and early 90s.

However, Barclay was right this week to draw inspiration from the way George Smith and Phil Waugh operated as a pair of openside flankers whose breakdown work kept Australia on the go in more recent years.

He also noted that the French themselves are prone to align their back row that way and while they are closer to having two No.8s than two No.7s this time around with Imanol Harinordoquy shifting to flanker to accommodate Louis Picamoles, the point still holds.

It is, though, at half-back that Scotland are really borrowing from tomorrow's opponents with the management finally deciding to commit fully to Edinburgh's interchangeable pairing of Greig Laidlaw and Mike Blair.

Andy Robinson's completely justifiable commitment to Chris Cusiter as the player he still designates his first- choice scrum-half since individually he is the most complete footballer available, has confused the issue. Consequently, Laidlaw and Blair were first kept in reserve as a combination for the meeting with England, then split up for the match against Wales. However, for Laidlaw's effectiveness to be maximised as a very different type of stand-off from Dan Parks and even Ruaridh Jackson, the best option was surely always to let him seek to set up the game in conjunction with his clubmate.

That they are particularly well suited to working that way was underlined by Blair's observation this week when he said: "I think if someone had said at the start of last season, or even midway through last season, that the half-backs for this game would be me and Greig you'd probably be guessing that Greig would be playing nine."

Unlike Cusiter, who has always been a specialist scrum-half, Blair, below, has played at stand-off in the past, but acknowledged that his former understudy when he was captaining Edinburgh, who is now his captain and half-back partner, had also always boasted the skills to switch roles. "Greig's had experience at 10. He has played there before," he pointed out. "It's not like he's just been thrown in, but I think the way he's gone about it has been exceptional. He's running a very good game at the moment. He has the respect of all the players around him. He's filled that role really well."

As with the two openside flankers, the way the duo work together can help generate the style of play that Scotland believe suits them best. "It helps to speed the game up a little bit as well," said Blair.

"If I'm covering from the middle of the pitch, to get to a wide breakdown, to pass the ball back into the middle, there's a lot of acceleration and deceleration and you've got to obviously decelerate into the ball to get a stable base to pass the ball back the way. Whereas if Greig is covering in behind the play and he's just got to go forward and then step out, the speed of ball from there can be a bit quicker.

"So if I was at first receiver I could set myself more quickly and organise on the outside, rather than mixing those roles up. I think it brings a little bit of extra speed to the game and obviously we do have that understanding as well that it's something that's going to happen in the game at some stage."

Simple as that really! Actually it is a lot more straightforward than it perhaps sounds and particular encouragement can be drawn from what was arguably the greatest-ever match played at Murrayfield just a few short months ago, when a Scottish side produced an incredible second-half comeback against a French side after Blair and Laidlaw were put in charge at half-time. "I think the Racing Metro match was a good example of how the game can go against the French," Blair said. "Edinburgh had a great start, 17-0 up, and the way that Racing came back into the game for that next 15 or 20 minutes is probably the best rugby I've ever seen at Murrayfield, whether it's international or club or what have you.

"But when we came out after half-time we looked after the ball, put phases together and put pressure on them and kept their large front five moving around the pitch. It didn't instantly come off, spreading the ball wide, but it fatigued them, so when you were coming into that last quarter they were really hanging and struggling. I think the make-up of the Racing side and the French side is similar: a big front five. You need to move them around. But they have a lot of quality behind the scrum as well so you can't afford to be too loose."

To have that chance in the last 20 minutes, though, Scotland have to be able to impose themselves from the off and sustain it, because what they can be absolutely sure of is that no French international team will let a 24-point lead go as Racing did.