Stuart Hogg seems set to miss both halves of Glasgow Warriors’ European Champions Cup double-header with French club Montpellier, but the club’s management is hopeful that the Scotland full-back will not be sidelined for too much longer than that.

The 25-year-old full-back pulled out of Scotland’s clash with Australia less than half an hour before kick off due to a hip injury and assistant coach Kenny Murray admitted it remains unclear how long he will be out.

“Stuart won’t be involved this week,” he confirmed. “Obviously we are still assessing the injury in terms of how long he might be out. It might be a matter of weeks. It’s just one of these things. The medics will see how he goes over the next week or two and see how he’s recovering but he won’t be involved this week. We’ll see how he goes but probably the likelihood is not the week after either.”

Even in his absence the coaches are facing the right kind of problems this week with a large contingent of international players who are buoyant following their autumn Test series in which they won two of their three matches and ended by handing a record thrashing to Australia’s Wallabies, re-joining clubmates who have taken Glasgow’s Pro14 winning run to double figures in their absence.

The only other area of concern was at hooker, with Dave Rennie, their head coach, indicating following last Friday’s 40-16 defeat of Cardiff Blues, that James Malcolm was the only one of their four hookers who was fully fit.

However Murray said yesterday that while Fraser Brown will not be involved at the weekend as his recovery from the latest in a worrying series of head knocks is carefully controlled, there was better news of both Pat Macarthur and George Turner.

“Pat trained today so he was doing pretty much 80 per cent training,” he explained. “He was in a pretty good place we just need to see how he gets on contact wise and George Turner got a bang in the neck. Again, he’s doing pretty well and should be okay for the weekend.”

As they prepare for these meetings with Montpellier in which they need to pick up bonus point wins to have any chance of exerting pressure on pool pace-setters Leinster and Exeter Chiefs, the depth of quality in the squad is meanwhile adding an extra element to their preparations, as Murray noted.

“The pace and tempo was right up there, that was as high as it goes,” he said. “We will measure guys and how hard they are working in training and a lot of the guys are working harder than they would in a game just because there is less contact involved. It is really high intensity stuff. ”