A century and a half of rugby will be marked this summer with the return to Perth of top-flight rugby when Glasgow Warriors play host to Harlequins on the North Inch.

This has the potential to demonstrate that the former home city of the Caledonia Reds district team could once again host a professional team.

Coinciding with Perthshire Rugby Club’s 150th anniversary season, the match will be played in a purpose built temporary stadium with 5000 capacity and is the first of two pre-season friendlies with English Premiership opposition immediately ahead of next season’s getting underway – the meeting with the London club taking place on August 18 before they visit Northampton Saints on August 24.

The timing is all the more apt since five products of nearby Strathallan School, the current Scottish under-18 schools champions, are in the senior Scotland squad that will tour the Americas this summer; George Horne, Murray McCallum, Jamie Ritchie and the Perth-born Fagerson brothers, Zander and Matt.

As the senior figure among that quintet in terms of international experience, Zander, the older of the Fagersons, expressed excitement yesterday at the prospect, saying: “I only live about 20 minutes away [and] I played in under-14 tournaments here so I’ve had a few great days at the Inch. It will be awesome for the community. Perthshire has a massive rugby community, their minis are massive, a huge, huge turnout week-in, week-out . . . rugby is thriving here.”

Playing their home matches at St Johnstone’s McDiarmid Park, Perth was chosen as the base for the Caledonia Reds when rugby went open in the mid-nineties and the decision was made to professionalise the four existing district teams.

However, they played their first Heineken Cup matches in the year that Fagerson was born (1996) and he has no recollection of rugby being played there, but believes there is a need to play top-level rugby north of the central belt.

“It is very important. Dundee, Aberdeen and so on don’t get as much as Glasgow, Stirling and the like [because] they are quite a distance away,” he observed.

“There are some great rugby players, Caley boys in the national and Glasgow teams so it is paramount that we get out to spread the word to let schools know we are here to support and get young players coming through.”

Those observations chimed with widely expressed views that the Scottish Rugby Union (SRU) had made a major error in setting up its new Super Six competition recently, appearing to retreat into what was once considered to be its heartlands by allocating two third of the franchises to clubs in Edinburgh and the Borders, with only Ayr and Stirling representing the rest of the country, with five of Scotland’s seven cities – Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee, Perth and Inverness – all missing out.

While, as an SRU employee, Perth rugby development officer Rory McKay had to choose his words carefully, the former Glasgow Warriors lock, who began playing the sport as a schoolboy in Aberdeen, yesterday expressed the hope that Super Six will be sufficiently successful to grow beyond its current narrow geographic boundaries.

He admitted that having played for Glasgow Hawks early in his career it “would have been nice” had they been included and said of the vast excluded area north of Stirling: “Ideally I would have liked to have seen a team further north. I don’t think anybody would disagree with that, but [it was down to] the strength of the bids or however that panned out. Super Six as a concept . . . I’m really interested to see where it goes. Is it going to expand, is it going to stay where it is? It’s quite exciting to see where it’ll go. What’s it going to mean for that transition? I know when I was playing club international stuff, having been a pro player previously, that it’s a big step up that probably needs bridged.”

As to whether August’s match could be a platform on which to build a case for basing a Super Six-style professional team in the area he said: “Somewhere in Tayside and Fife . . . absolutely. I think having that stepping stone between club rugby and the professional game is needed. What that looks like, let’s see how Super Six runs.”