Invited, on Friday evening, to contemplate extra cause for celebration following his side’s magnificent achievement of winning their Champions Cup pool on their first attempt in five seasons, Richard Cockerill was almost mockingly dismissive of the political correctness of the environment in which he is now working.

History had been made by his side, not only on their own behalf, but in completing their pool campaign with a victory that meant Glasgow Warriors were also guaranteed qualification, the first time that both Scottish teams had reached the quarter-finals of the competition in the same season. For Cockerill, though, that was no sort of bonus.

"There's always one down side to the evening isn't there?” he chuckled, before adding grudgingly: “Look, I enjoy the rivalry and the rivalry is going to get stronger and better. It's great for Scottish rugby. We've got two teams in the quarter-finals, there's a lot of good things happening in the Scottish game, so let's enjoy it.”

Transported to Scotland’s capital from Leicester, via Toulon, smaller and less affluent cities that have accrued five Champions Cup wins between them, there are times when Edinburgh’s head coach seems to be stifling an urge to express open contempt for the tweeness of a relationship between Scotland’s professional teams that is the antithesis of what brings the best out of sporting neighbours.

Throughout the professional era the Scottish Rugby owned teams have been marketed in just that way, part of the same centrally owned project, publicly more inclined to will one another on rather than delight in having the upper hand domestically, while developing a harder edge that can better serve them further afield.

Scottish rugby was at its best in the eighties and nineties when, as they liked to depict one another, Border bumpkins were going hammer and tongs at one another as well as Edinburgh’s posh set, improving all the more when the minority of Glasgow boys schooled in the sport were persuaded to stay off the ski slopes when the season’s important matches were being played and North & Midlands officials finally persuaded their best players to stop disappearing south to help their rivals become better teams. Given that London Scottish had produced more Scottish internationals than any other club, best of all was when the Anglo Scots were thrown into the mix, giving players in all four home-based Scottish districts a regular opportunity to show what they could do against ‘foreign’ opposition.

Cockerill’s innate understanding of what it takes to create a competitive edge is beginning to serve Scottish rugby well, then and even as he briefly went on to consider the benefits for Glasgow there was something slightly goading in his observation that: “Saracens will be under pressure now because Glasgow can go there and there's no pressure on them, they can go and play. That will suit them and good luck to them."

In short, the man who has guided his team to victory in successive 1872 Cup campaigns and wins in four of five derbies, reckons Glasgow do better when they are not under pressure.

His Edinburgh side had meanwhile coped with requiring to win every remaining match to win their Champions Cup pool, after losing the opener in Montpellier, in the course of that run claiming their own first away win in eight months when they won at Newcastle, then inflicting on three-time champions Toulon only their third home defeat in competition history, in between times beating Glasgow home and away.

In some senses the challenge facing Cockerill was more straightforward than that undertaken by his Glasgow counterpart Dave Rennie when both took on their new roles at the beginning of last season.

In Edinburgh there was a clear issue to be addressed in terms of attitude and the task he faced in challenging that was made easier when off-field indiscretions by Magnus Bradbury, whom he had made club captain and senior professional John Hardie fully exposed those issues to internal and external examination.

By contrast Rennie arrived into a Warriors set-up that believed it had joined European rugby’s elite, on the back of a Pro12 title won during a brief period of rebuilding within the leading Irish provinces, as demonstrated the following season when no Irish or Celtic side reached the quarter-finals of the Champions Cup and little Connacht then won the Pro12 title.

Glasgow’s Pro12 success had meanwhile effectively been the end of a toughening up project which began when Al Kellock was recruited a decade or so earlier, at a time when the team’s management was determined to transform their image of being “nice to watch and nice to play against,” the captain retiring after that triumph.

The suspicion that New Zealander Rennie privately understands what he cannot say publicly about the way Glasgow have been allowed to lapse back to bad old ways with style prioritised over substance, seemed confirmed when his compatriot and assistant coach Jason O’Halloran offered the view late last season that their players’ attitudes are 20 years behind those of their Kiwi counterparts in the way they struggle to cope with “constructive feedback.”

Meantime, the extent to which Irish and Celtic rugby has collectively turned things around in the past few years was first demonstrated when three Pro14 teams occupied semi-final spots in last season’s Champions Cup, Leinster going on to win it and is all the more evident in the presence of five Celtic teams in this season’s quarter-finals, once again including the three big Irish provinces.

Of that quintet, a mentally tough Edinburgh side that qualified for this competition from much the tougher of the Pro14 Conferences, yet is still short on the depth of player quality that all the other qualifiers boast, has leapt into the vanguard, joining the current best teams in England, France and the Pro14 in having earned the right to host a Champions Cup quarter-final at the end of March.

As Cockerill rightly pointed out, when expressing the hope that they might attract a crowd of up to 50,000 to the national stadium for that occasion: "75 per cent of teams win their quarter-finals when they're at home. Simple as that.

“We've got a team worth watching. When I came here why would you come and watch because we were pretty crap. Now we're not. We've shown we're a bloody good side. Come and support us. The boys deserve it."

Rugby is a sport in which players and teams tend to get what they deserve and to that end, Glasgow have now been given a further chance to show they have the ability and learning capacity to get to a new level when they once again visit Saracens in the quarter-finals.

There was something almost impertinent about the social media message issued by Glasgow after Edinburgh had helped them out on Friday.

“We have qualified for the Champions Cup with a game to spare,” was factually accurate admittedly, but somehow it seemed to imply that theirs was a superior achievement to those who had got there in the last round of matches, as Edinburgh had.

The reality was that it was merely a gift of scheduling and, having been drawn in a much easier pool with tournament newcomers Lyon and a Cardiff Blues side that had not played in the Champions Cup for five years, Glasgow effectively scraped into the last of the eight quarter-final slots. That is why they must return to Allianz Park after Saturday’s defeat in which, pressure or no pressure, the 38-19 scoreline in their pool decider was disturbingly similar to the 38-13 loss suffered in their solitary previous quarter-final appearance at the same venue two years ago.

Both Scottish teams are, then, currently second in their Pro14/European qualifying campaigns and are in this season’s Champions Cup quarter-finals, but in competitive terms it is Edinburgh who are currently miles better and entitled to rub Glaswegian noses in it.