The best coaches I worked with were the ones who put the interests of the team before their own. What Andy Robinson has done this week strikes me as a prime example of such selflessness.

The experiment with joint captains is the ultimate ballsy call from the Scotland coach, because if it doesn’t work, it’s not the players who’ll be blamed — and he knows this well.

After the stick he took with England you might expect him to take the conservative option when it comes to any high-profile decision, never mind his first in the job. But this is a move he thinks will benefit the team so he has said: "To hell with what people think and to what people think of me. I’ll make the call, and I’ll take responsibility for it."

My first impression was that it smacked of indecisiveness but, when you consider his action, it’s a pretty cute piece of psychology. We’ve got a unique problem here, so why not look for novel solutions.

Our two best players and our two best potential captains play in the same position. Every other country in the world would be happy to have one of Mike Blair and Chris Cusiter, never mind the pair, but we’ve got to find a way of keeping them both happy, keeping them both involved and keeping them both right at the very peak of their form.

The approach in the past has been to go with one of them, almost arbitrarily, considering how little there is between them. Matt Williams went with Cus, while Frank Hadden tended to side with Blair, even if all those injuries Cusiter suffered meant it wasn’t always a fair fight.

Those coaches probably thought they were being decisive, making a call and getting on with it, but what Robinson is doing is more imaginative. He’s still going to disappoint one of the guys each week, but he’s making sure the odd man out doesn’t have any excuse for going in the huff or feeling disenfranchised. When you have two players of this calibre, and only one jersey, you need to keep them both engaged. You want the guy on the bench saying: "Out of the way, I want to play", but you want to channel that desire in a positive, not destructive, way.

How Robinson has designed it, the one who doesn’t start will still have responsibility in the week leading up to the game and the autonomy to change it when he eventually takes the field. Scrum-half is a position where you know both guys will get some time in the course of every match, whether it’s 50/30, 60/20 or 65/15. If Cus had been a prop, he’d have been captain and that would have been the end of it, but Robinson had a lot more to weigh up here.

As he’s set it up, both men know they have scope to make a meaningful impact and both will feel that they are the first choice. For my money, Cusiter will get the nod for Fiji and then it will be up to him to hold down the position and the armband.

They’re a strange lot, scrum-halves. When I played, the competition was even more intense, with Bryan Redpath, Gary Armstrong and Andy Nicol all gunning for one place at times. There was never that bitching you saw in other positions, though. It’s like goalkeepers in football, they seem to stick together.

I’ve watched our two 9s at close quarters and there’s a lot of respect alongside the competition. They are secure enough about their own ability to be able to take a holistic view. Of course they’ll each be desperate to play, but they know they’ll both get chances and I can’t see any way that factionalism will take hold.

If anything, the rest of the squad will welcome this new set-up. They will know that, whichever scrum-half plays and captains, he’ll have earned the right. Players resent a captain who looks like he’s being picked irrespective of his form. Look at Steve Borthwick with England; he had one good game in the last Six Nations and he’s not the best player in the country in his position, second row. A skipper runs the risk of losing respect in that situation. If our captain has one mediocre game, he could be out on his ear. He’s in the same boat as everyone else.

We need to remember as well that this is not just about Blair and Cusiter. It’s about breeding more leaders in this team. Robinson would love to get to a position where the captaincy is virtually irrelevant, as was the case with the England side he helped to win the 2003 World Cup. Any one of about 10 individuals could have skippered that side; there were so many willing to lead and put their balls on the line for the rest.

The Scotland teams I played in always had four or five big figures, like the Hastings, David Sole, Armstrong, Brush, Alan Tait. That sort of inspirational charisma hasn’t been as common of late. The team have looked over-coached and low on personality. What we need going into the 2011 World Cup is half a dozen big characters pushing the thing forward. I’m talking about Nathan Hines, Ross Ford and Euan Murray — all Lions — and guys like Alasdair Strokosch and John Barclay, both of whom are willing to speak out about underachievement.

These players have to realise what a position of privilege they’re in, but also the responsibility they have to themselves to fulfil their potential. I remember an occasion at Wasps where we had lost two games on the bounce and right before the next match, Shaun Edwards stopped the bus a mile from the ground and told us to walk in through the punters. We heard every comment, every criticism and it humbled us into remembering who and what we were playing for.

I don’t imagine Robinson will tell the driver to pull over at Haymarket on Saturday, but what I do know is that he’s a coach who’s making his players think. And that is the first step towards a winning Scotland.

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