Grant Gilchrist on his Scotland future and 'signs of a good team' at Edinburgh

The Edinburgh lock turned 33 in August but still feels there is plenty left in the tank as he looks to add to his 68 caps stretching back to his Scotland debut a decade ago in the 2013 Six Nations.

Asked if he had given any thought to calling time on his Test career, he replied: "No. I’ve said I’m not going to step away. I’ve not been good enough at times in my career to play for Scotland. It’s about being on form and good enough to play. If I’m good enough to play, I want to play. I love playing for Scotland. It’s up to the coaches to pick the team and at times, you might not be selected. But I’ll certainly be putting up my hand and trying my best week in, week out to get results for Edinburgh, making sure I am playing my best rugby so I can put my hand up for national selection as well.”

Gilchrist knows that his club form with Edinburgh will be a major factor in his continued selection in Gregor Townsend's squads and he has been happy with the start made to the URC season under new head coach Sean Everitt.

"The positive thing about the way we have started is that every week, we have felt like we have not played at our best. That is a sign of a good team that we have learned how to win these tight games. We have got better week on week but we have not quite hit our potential yet. I hope that continues for a long time because our mindset is we just want to keep getting better week on week.

“When you look around the training pitch and the quality of squad we have, there is nobody we should be fearing. When we click at our very best, we can beat anyone on our day. We are not losing sight of the fact we have got a lot of work to do, because when we look at the games we’ve played already, they were games that shouldn’t have been close if we had played at our best. We should have won by a bigger margin.”