Type the phrase "too many hookers" into Google and all you get is page after page of complaints about ladies of the night inhabiting a variety of travel resorts around the globe.

Ten pages in and still no mention of the latest dilemma hitting Scottish rugby, which is strange - surely it is an issue that deserves more prominence than that.

After all it is little more than a month since Jonathan Humphreys, the Scotland forwards coach, claimed that hooker was the most stressed and pressured position in the team; at least on a par with, and probably exceeding, the focus on the main goalkicker.

Yet, when he sits down at selection meetings, he is having to cope with a sudden glut of prospects hunting their place in the hot-seat. They all want to be exposed to that stress: what gives?

Well, for one thing the dearth of hookers available at Test level did not go unnoticed. So a host of young players who, in previous years, might have been encouraged to stay put in the back row were encouraged to shift forwards. If you were 6ft or shorter, somebody was going to say "hooker - a decade ago, it worked for Ross Ford". So suddenly it became the fashionable thing to do.

The result is that after years of famine, when Scottish hookers resembled the white rhino, possibly in terms of size and general attitude, but certainly in terms of scarcity and risk of extinction, suddenly you can't move for them. Including academy players linked to both Glasgow Warriors and Edinburgh, there are 12 on full-time contracts, of one sort or another, with the Scottish Rugby Union. Plus the likes of Scott Lawson soldiering on in Exile at Newcastle Falcons.

Fraser Brown and Kevin Bryce both made the move and have been rewarded with caps; Stuart McInally is biding his time as he waits to force his 6ft 3ins frame into the front row. Neil Cochrane may have left his conversion too late to make him a cap contender but he has been doing a solid job with Edinburgh in recent weeks.

The problem is that there is no way the international side can accommodate them all, especially if you assume that the likes of Jake Kerr, bubbling under in the Edinburgh academy, will emerge sooner, rather than later, to add to the competition. The shortage of hookers is yesterday's battle. Currently if you want a position where there is a real shortage, you look at openside flanker, the position some of these guys left.

To put this in context, for eight years after Gordon Bulloch retired in 2005, just three players, Lawson, Dougie Hall and Ross Ford, had the position to pretty much to themselves until the summer of last year, sharing 138 of the 144 starting and bench positions available in the 72 Tests Scotland played - the other eight all went to Fergus Thomson, who might have made the hooking trio a quartet but for injury.

Since then Scotland have used five hookers in 18 Tests, even though Ford has been undisputed top choice most of that time and Hall has been injured for some of it. There is a good chance that some of those coming through the system will get their chance over the next few months, adding even more to the competition at the highest level.

In the end, it was Pat MacArthur, the Glasgow hooker, who broke the Ford-Hall-Lawson stranglehold when he won the starting spot against Samoa 18 months ago, but it shows how intense the competition is that in the most recent Test series he could not even make the training squad while Fraser Brown, his club rival, was on the bench for the final two Tests. Conversely, Brown had not made the travelling party for the summer tour a few months earlier as the numbers two and 16 shirts were shifted around at a rate that made pass-the-parcel with a grenade look tame.

It is a position MacArthur takes stoically: "You always have motivation to play at the top level, to play international rugby, to do that you have to perform in the big games for your club team,"he says. "If you do, you get the chance to perform at a higher level you will take that on.

"I am playing well and happy with what I am doing; I am always working on new things to improve as a player. These big games I am thinking solely of Glasgow, though. When we talk about the unity and strength of our team, we are a very tight knit group, and that is not just the starting 15 or the match 23, but the 40 or 50 we have here. Having so many internationalists grows us as a squad and when they come back it lifts the team again."

As he points out, all he can do is play as well as he can and hope it is enough to impress the people who make the selection decisions, though there does not seem to be any consistency across the board with MacArthur getting most the bigger club games while Brown was getting the international nod.

"Gregor [Townsend, the Glasgow head coach] always says that he will always pick the team he believes will win that week. I have to just take my chances when given them and take things forward."