If Rae does end up in the box-seat, it will be a huge ask for a player who started his senior rugby career as a 17-year-old in the Ayr side which won the Premiership in 2012-13, and whose pro career has since taken in spells with Glasgow Warriors, Benetton on loan, London Scottish on loan, Bath, Montpellier and most recently Edinburgh.<\/p>\n
He is a player who has tended to float under the radar, but Dalziel insists that the now 30-year-old\u2019s game and physique is suited to international rugby.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve got good depth here around that [tight-head prop position] and what we\u2019ve been able to do in Zander\u2019s absence is to get caps into the guys around it like D\u2019Arcy Rae who\u2019s been around the Scotland squad for a long period of time and got his first start at the weekend,\u201d said Dalziel.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo it\u2019s been great for him to build that up and build that cohesion. His game is really suited to Test rugby as well, so yeah it\u2019s been disappointing not to have Zander but it\u2019s been excellent in terms of growing that depth.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou are on a journey with your rugby career,\u201d replied Dalziel, when asked to reflect on Rae being an example of a player who has not always had the breaks in terms of selection and playing opportunities, but has still managed to keep himself in the frame for a period of over a decade. \u201cYou can come through then you go to something new \u2013 and he ended up at Bath then came back to Edinburgh \u2013 so he\u2019s been around a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI was lucky enough to have him in the under 20s and have watched his progress, and at Glasgow as well, and he always comes back round to international rugby because his game suits that kind of game.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn terms of his club, his form and other players around that, you might never see it. But his determination and work-rate has got him back and he\u2019s in probably the best shape he\u2019s ever been in terms of his game and how he controls himself, so yeah he\u2019s been a good asset.<\/p>\n
\u201cHis set-piece power and the way he stops power, I think he can be at his very best when the stakes are really high, and in the big moments he comes to the fore.\u201d<\/p>\n
Head coach Gregor Townsend<\/strong> indicated after Saturday\u2019s big win over the USA that he expected to finalise his match-day 23 to face New Zealand by Monday evening, but that was not set in stone and he appears to have decided to give himself an extra day to give the likes of Fagerson and flanker Rory Darge<\/strong> as much time as possible to prove their fitness.<\/p>\n \u201cBoth of them made big strides last week,\u201d said Dalziel. \u201cObviously, Zander\u2019s been out for a long period of time so to back up both days last week [was important]. Tomorrow will be a big day on that and I think Gregor will give an update after that but ,really, it\u2019ll be a case of trying to make the right decision for him as well.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a long time to be out and I know we all want to see him back as soon as possible, and we\u2019re hopeful that he\u2019ll be on track, but we\u2019ll do the right thing with him and see how he is to train tomorrow.<\/p>\n \u201cWe know Zander very well and it\u2019s not that we\u2019ve been working a deadline. Everything he\u2019s been doing to tick off to get to the stage to be able to train two days a week has been done. He\u2019s had the hours put into him to get him to that stage, but we\u2019re not just going to throw him out there to play 70 or 80 minutes as we\u2019ve maybe seen in the past. There will be a plan in place.\u201d<\/p>\n Dalziel added that stand-off Adam Hastings<\/strong> has been cleared to take a full part in this week\u2019s build-up. \u201cThrough the alert and the mouthguard, he failed his first test and then he\u2019s passed two and three so the doctor\u2019s passed him fit,\u201d the coach explained. \u201cHe joined in with skills and stuff today as well, so all good to play, no concussion.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If Rae does end up in the box-seat, it will be a huge ask for a player who…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":547238,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4102],"tags":[85185,4151,712,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-547237","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-rugby","8":"tag-divi","9":"tag-rugby","10":"tag-scotland","11":"tag-sports","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547237\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/547238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}