Provincial English club Exeter Chiefs could provide a template to follow, but replicating what last year’s Premiership champions have done still represents a long-term project according to Edinburgh’s head coach Richard Cockerill.

After a highly promising first season at the club, his second has begun with three defeats in their first four matches, the last completed with just 14 men as they suffered a hefty 31-7 loss to reigning champions Leinster. Far from despondent, though, the Cockerill remains bullish about the way his side are performing and reckons that if they play to a similar level over the next fortnight wins will come against Treviso and the Cheetahs.

“We have played pretty well. You can find negatives, won one from four, bottom of the conference, yada, yada, yada, but we have only played one home game and played some tough teams away,” he said. “If we play as we have been we will get results. We have two home games and we need to win them. You need to win your home games if you have ambition in this competition. It is an important couple of weeks.

“Progress isn’t winning the league, it’s taking small steps in the right direction. We’re taking small steps in the right direction, because, the players that went out at the weekend, or the players that played at Ulster, they’re playing as hard as they can. There’s things we can do better, there’s skills we can improve on, there’s all those things, but we’ve got to keep this group together and we’re strong and we’re very much all pointing in the same direction and we’re going to work bloody hard and get better.”

The coach is perhaps in danger of becoming a victim of his own success explaining why he repeatedly sought, last season, to manage expectations by saying his team was well ahead of schedule when reaching the Pro14 play-offs. That campaign followed years of failure, inviting examination of whether they were over-performing or merely beginning to live up to how the Scottish capital sees itself, as a major rugby city. That, in turn, fuelled suspicion that Glasgow Warriors have had much greater support from their Scottish Rugby owners over the years and having made no attempt to dilute that as he has made the case for greater backing, Cockerill included his team’s closest neighbours in the list of those they are seeking to catch up with.

“On what basis do we compete like for like with Scarlets, Ulster, Leinster, Munster, Glasgow?” he asked, rhetorically. “When we’re talking like for like, and we’re spending the same amounts of money, and other things, then you can compare like for like, can’t you.”

That is what makes the rise of the Exeter Chiefs all the more compelling, their unfashionable status reinforced last week when, having begun the new season with four successive wins, there were complaints from within their camp about their lack of representation in the latest England squad.

“They’ve got good players haven’t they and they’ve brought lots of good players through,” Cockerill acknowledged. “That’s a model that’s not a bad one to follow, is it? There’re probably more rugby players in Devon and Cornwall than there are in Scotland.”

That should be as chastening as it is realistic, given that those two counties are considered outposts of rugby in England where participation numbers dwarf Scotland’s and it has taken Exeter a long time to get there, doing so in an environment where they could develop under far less scrutiny than in the two-team Scottish professional scene.

“Exeter, when they got promoted, were getting beat by 40 or 50 points by the top teams. Six or seven years later they’re a very good side,” Cockerill observed. “You learn on the way. You can’t just go from where we were to suddenly ‘I tell you what we’ll do, we’ll decide we’re good now and we’ll compete’, unless you’re spending 20 million pound buying a whole team.”

While, then, Cockerill does not like having to do so, he feels entitled to keep explaining defeats away for the foreseeable future while focusing on competitiveness and combativeness.

“I get the point of ‘how long are you going to make excuses for yourself?’, but a while longer yet, because they’re valid and it’s as simple as that,” he asserted. “We haven’t got the depth of strength of tradition of a lot of those clubs, or the pool to pick from, or the money to spend. Now that’s not an excuse. You’ve got to temper your ambition.”