LAST week he announced his first squad as Scotland coach. This week the hands-on work begins in earnest for Gregor Townsend when he welcomes his players to Oriam in Edinburgh for a training camp.

The transition from Vern Cotter’s three years in charge to the new era under Townsend has been a smooth one, and the former Glasgow Warriors coach hopes that will be reflected on the pitch this summer when the team take on Italy, Australia and Fiji. The fact the team made a marked improvement in their final year under his predecessor may increase the pressure on Townsend, but he prefers to see it as an encouraging sign: one that will ensure morale is high when they set off for their first match in Singapore next month.

“It’s great that the team have been going much better, and it’s been very encouraging to see the way they’ve played and the buzz around the squad,” he said. “We’ve got to go into this tour full of confidence. There’s lots to learn, but there’s lots to compete for over there.

“Italy will be better prepared than they’ve been up to this point; they’re going to have a three-week camp like us, which will be [head coach] Conor O’Shea’s first time working with the players over a longer period. It’s a neutral venue, Singapore is going to be a challenge for both teams, so that’s going to be a very tough game.

“Then when you play Australia in Sydney with an afternoon kick-off, you know what rugby is going to come at you there. Playing Fiji on neutral ground would be very difficult, but to play them out in Fiji is one of the great challenges in rugby. It’s a tough tour, but I believe this squad have the ability and also the momentum behind them to get those wins.”

One of Cotter’s first, self-imposed tasks when he arrived in 2014 was to get the team playing in a style with which they were happy: one, he explained, that fitted the traditional strengths of the Scottish game. Taking the attitude that if it’s not broken, why fix it?, Townsend aims to finesse that style rather than seeking a radical departure.

“There won’t be too many changes,” he said. “I don’t want to say what attack shape we’re using - it’s slightly different, but most of the rugby Scotland have been playing is not too dissimilar to how Glasgow have been playing. What we’ll want to play like won’t be too dissimilar to Glasgow as well.

“There’s certainly been an expression of playing at a higher tempo, of moving the ball into the back line as much as possible. We might do it slightly differently, but that’s why a lot of the players who played in the Six Nations are going on tour. They’ve shown they’re able to play a game that’s fast-paced.

“The other side is defence. We’ve got to make sure they’re guys who are able to tackle and be really aggressive in defence.

“The benefit now is that we’ll have six weeks together this summer. What we need to make sure we get right as coaches is that between July and October we don’t give too much information to the players, that we handle that period really well in terms of communication, tracking form, making sure that when they come in camp there’s a lot of clarity.”

Townsend will play a lead role, of course, in ensuring that there is clarity, and forwards coach Dan McFarland and defence coach Matt Taylor have moved to Murrayfield from the Warriors with him to help provide continuity. By far the most interesting addition to the new coaching team, however, is Mike Blair.

Although the former Scotland scrum-half also comes from Townsend’s old coaching team at Scotstoun - where in fact he will still be based outwith the international windows - Blair is an unknown quantity in the sense that he has only been a full-time coach for one season. His title is skills coach, which gives him a roving brief, but perhaps his most important job will be to introduce new ideas, above all in attack: ideas that will be wholly unfamiliar to those opposition coaches who think they have begun to get a handle on how Townsend sets up his sides to play.

“He does all the work I used to do,” Townsend said when asked to explain where Blair fits into the coaching team. “For four years I was doing all the attack, and it’s been great this year to have someone else helping on that side.

“One part of that is skills, the catch-pass work, also the analysis of the opposition, looking at attack plays where we might score tries. I love those conversations with him. It’s a great opportunity for him and for us, but in his whole coach development, it was also important he stayed with a club team. I was an assistant coach with Scotland and I did get frustrated in the early part of my coaching career because I wasn’t able to coach every day. Mike has that chance now.

“He’s adjusted to the life of a coach really quickly. I was impressed with him last summer, seeing him in very early in the morning and still there late at night, talking about coaching, doing the sessions nobody else is watching like taking the injured guys for skill work. And not just doing it, but loving it, and really thinking about how to improve it.

“He’s also very self-critical. It’s new for a player to go and present to a big group, but he’s worked out what he needs to get better and over the last few months I’ve definitely seen Mike’s impact get bigger and bigger. He’s much more relaxed and at ease with himself and with being a coach.

“When Glasgow signed Mike, he said he was keen to go into coaching, so it was a two-year deal with the second going into coaching. When you go to coach at apprentice level, there are sacrifices you make, salary being one of them, but also the time commitment. Mike’s done a really good job and a lot of the plays we’ve run this year have been his ideas.”

Even at this early stage of his career, it would not be too far-fetched to see the 36-year-old Blair as a Scotland coach of the future. But the immediate future, of course, belongs to Townsend. Last week we learned who the new national coach deemed worthy of touring with the side this summer. This week a picture will begin to emerge of how he will work with his players: what he expects of them, and the demands he makes on himself and his coaching colleagues.