Allan Massie: Adam Ashe in for baptism of fire

Dan Parks, who retired this week. Picture: Ian Rutherford

AT THE end of last month Glasgow lost the RaboDirect Pro12 final to Leinster in Dublin. Today, ten Glasgow players plus Geoff Cross, who finished last season with Glasgow, and four others drafted in from Edinburgh and Biarritz take on the might of South Africa in Port Elizabeth

It is the last match of a Scotland tour on which players have spent so much time in airports and on planes that they must all be in need of a holiday at home.

At least there’s some continuity this week, Vern Cotter having retained most of the squad that came from behind to beat Argentina last week. The decision to keep Duncan Weir at stand-off means that Tom Heathcote must be the only one of the touring party not to get on the field.

In contrast Adam Ashe, who has just flown in from playing college rugby in New Zealand, becomes the eighth player to win a first cap on the tour. Mike Blair recently recalled that the former Scotland coach Frank Hadden reckoned that a player needed to play around 50 professional games before he was ready for international rugby. Well, young Ashe hasn’t even started one match for Glasgow. Talk about throwing an infant into the pool and telling him to start swimming – even though this is quite a substantial infant.

South Africa have an infant of their own at stand-off, Handre Pollard, fresh from playing in the final of the Junior Rugby World Cup. He was named Junior World Player of the Year and the Springbok coach Heneyke Meyer calls him “a special player with brilliant, brilliant, brilliant touches on the ball”, which suggests that he is quite useful, or a bit more than that. Nevertheless a full international is a step up from the Junior World Cup, and Scotland will surely look to give him an uneasy opening 20 minutes in an attempt to knock him off his game.

This is a mildly experimental South African side, given that there are five uncapped players in the 23-man squad, and it is missing established stars like Jean de Villiers, Morne Steyn, Bryan Habana and Francois Louw, but it is still a team packed with players who not only have the experience of winning big games but the expectation of doing so. They came very close to losing to Wales last week, and, while Scotland will surely have watched the video of that game closely, we don’t have runners like Jamie Roberts and Alex Cuthbert who punched holes in the Springbok defence. So, if we are to pull off what would be a remarkable win, we will surely have to find some other means of doing so.

We certainly cannot afford to drop passes or lose the ball in contact as we did so often against Argentina. What’s more, our defensive alignment will have to be better than it was when we leaked two tries then, and we shall have to find some legal way to stop the Springboks’ rolling maul. Wales’s failure to do so cost them two yellow