As Stuart McInally ploughed in for what was to prove a vital try against London Irish, the idea of the man who captained Scotland this year playing as a hooker was no more than a twinkle in a coach’s eye. John Barclay and Henry Pyrgos, his fellow Scotland captains and Edinburgh team-mates, were both playing for Glasgow Warriors; Mikey Blair, who is now on the Warriors coaching team, was the senior figure in the Edinburgh squad.

Much can happen in seven years in pro rugby, so little wonder that Grant Gilchrist struggles to recall details of his remarkable debut season in the capital. The lock is another who has since gone on to captain his country, as well as his club, in the interim, but as the events recounted elsewhere in HeraldSport today were unfolding, he had just turned 21 and was mixing it with some of the most gnarled monsters in the sport. The lesson learned in a campaign built on three narrow wins in their first four matches, was that in the Heineken Cup it is all about getting into position to challenge and then seizing the opportunities presented.

“It was my first season with Edinburgh and I was just delighted to be playing and be involved. It was a whirlwind, you put yourself in a position and all of a sudden, not too dissimilar to now, if we can get yourself in a position in the first few games then these games start to become really, really exciting,” he said.

A key factor in 2011/12, serving as an important warning this weekend, was how Edinburgh recovered from a heavy loss in Cardiff, to win the return at Murrayfield a week later. Gilchrist consequently knows he and his team-mates can expect Sunday’s visit to Newcastle Falcons to be a very different proposition from last weekend when they ran out fairly comfortable 31-13 winners.

“It’s always a challenge to play the same side two weeks in a row,” he said. “We have experience of it now but it’s always a bit of a strange feeling, things you’ve done in that game, do you want to change up the tactics a little bit, or stick with the same plan and hope it works again?

“There’s a balance to be struck in that and I’m sure they’ll make a lot of changes this week so for us this doubleheader is probably going to be like playing two different teams. We know their strengths and weaknesses of whatever team they’re going to play and we’ll be ready for them.”

Last weekend’s win was doubly valuable. players who had performed so well in beating Toulon in October, not having played together since, which showed in a scratchy first half. As television pictures from inside the dressing room showed at the interval, tea cups remained firmly on trays, with no sense of panic in the ranks as a clear understanding of what was required held sway.

“(The feeling was) we hadn’t played that well, let’s just make sure we do our jobs in the second half. We’d had a half of rugby to get back up to speed and it was time to put it together,” said Gilchrist. “We weren’t a million miles away in the first half, we did take them out of the game and it was just little bits of inaccuracy. It was never going to be beautiful on the eye, but it didn’t have to be. It was about controlling things in the second half, put them in the right areas and reap the rewards. Obviously it’s hard when the weather was how it was and that group hadn’t played together for quite a while. We were a bit rusty in the first half, but a really pleasing, professional performance in the second half got the job done and we got exactly what we wanted, regardless of the situations outwith our control. All we could do was what we did, rusty first half, played well second half, got the five points.”

They know they will need to raise their game again when facing a team that is still in contention, can call upon additional quality and is on home turf, but Gilchrist believes they have the capacity to do so.

“We’d want to be better than we were last weekend,” said Gilchrist. “If the conditions are like they were on Friday night then we’d want to play in a similar style, but I think we’ve shown in our European games so far that’s there’s a lot more to us than just forward play. We’ve got a dangerous backline that moved the ball a lot against Montpellier and Toulon when the weather allowed us to. If it’s a good afternoon we’ll look to play a lot more on than we did on Friday night.”