Richard Cockerill has selected his strongest possible team in a bid to ensure that Edinburgh get the victory that will lift them off the bottom of their Pro14 Conference table, but he has dismissed any suggestion that they are under additional pressure because of their league position.

So far this season they have meet four former Pro12 and Pro14 champions, three of them away from home, so the head coach believes it would be a mistake to place to much emphasis on the current standings.

“Obviously if you get two positive results in the next two weeks those dynamics change very quickly, so, I think just worrying about the league table is a little bit of fool’s gold, really,” he said.

“We’ve got to make sure that we get two positive results in the next two weeks and then suddenly we’re right back in the mix and we go into Europe and then we have Zebre away then Scarlets here during the international window. The next four league games are very important for us.”

As reasonable as that is, he is clearly leaving as little as possible to chance for the visit of opponents who sprang a surprise on their last visit to Edinburgh this time last year, having picked the strongest available line-up in the absence of South African prop Pierre Schoeman, who has been banned for four weeks after being red carded last weekend and Scotland centre Mark Bennett, who has been sidelined long-term through injury.

“It’s a very strong side, isn’t it? I mean there’s some guys that pick themselves to a point, obviously Schoeman would come into that category as well, so would Mark Bennett (but) we’re starting to get a settled pattern of selection,” said Cockerill.

In saying so he indicated that competition for some places remains keen.

“There’s Luke Hamilton as well, who’s played very well for us and he has a rest this week because he’s a bit battered and bruised,” he said. “Magnus (Bradbury) at six with (Bill) Mata and (Hamish) Watson is a pretty well-balanced back row and gives us some real strength at the breakdown and with our ball carry. It’s pretty much our full-strength side, but that’s for this week, really.”

The nature of their schedule has clearly forced the management team into some difficult decisions since they could have flogged their leading players to little avail, given the calibre of opposition they were visiting in the Ospreys, Ulster and Leinster, with a home match against Connacht offering little in the way of respite.

While he could not have said he was treating last weekend’s trip to Dublin as an unwinnable fixture, then, that match seemed to have been identified as an opportunity to rest key men, while also offering those who are seeking to challenge them the chance to show their competitiveness against the best in Europe.

Many of them did so, Leinster having to work hard to get the better of them, but there is an injection of quality in the return of Scotland trio Blair Kinghorn, Matt Scott and Henry Pyrgos and former New Zealand U20 captain Simon Hickey to the back-line as well as skipper Stuart McInally, his international colleagues WP Nel, Grant Gilchrist and Hamish Watson and, for the first time in three weeks, Fijian internationalist Bill Mata.

“It’s good to have them back,” said Cockerill. “They’ve had a week’s downtime and a little bit of recovery. It was always the plan from last week to bring them back in, because these two games are very important for us.”

They do so at a key stage in the season with selection for the autumn internationals becoming a consideration, but Cockerill is understandably uninterested in anything other than what they can contribute to the Edinburgh cause.

““It’s an important time of year because they need to play well for us,” he stressed.

“I’m not bothered about Scotland. We need to play with the intent that we played at Ulster and carry on from Connacht. I thought we did some good things last week at Leinster, so we just need to keep our level of performance high and those international boys need to show that they’re of Test quality. Simple as that. They’ve got to do it at club level, because it won’t just happen at international level. They all need to perform well.”