KYLE Steyn had to wait long enough to win his second cap - so long, in fact, and in such trying circumstances, that at one stage he thought he was fated to never pull on a Scotland jersey again. But he certainly made the most of it when his opportunity arose yesterday, scoring four tries and being named man of the match in his team’s 60-14 victory over Tonga

The Glasgow Warriors winger made his Scotland debut in March 2020, coming off the bench to help complete a memorable 28-17 win over France in the national team’s last outing before lockdown called a halt for a time to all competitive sport. A lengthy hamstring injury put paid to any hopes that Steyn might have had of adding to that solitary cap last season, then the cancellation of the planned summer Tests added further frustration. 

But he has been on impressive form in his early outings for Glasgow in this campaign, and showed the Murrayfield crowd - back for a Test for the first time since that France game - just how much they have been missing these past 19 months with a virtuoso display of finishing.

Much of the talk in the build-up to the match had been about the eight debutants Gregor Townsend had selected in his matchday 23, and it was one of the octet, Rufus McLean, who seized the spotlight early on with his team’s opening two tries. Then, however, Steyn took over where his Warriors team-mate left off, running in a hat-trick before half-time then adding a fourth after the break. It was the first time since Gavin Hastings in the 1995 World Cup match against Ivory Coast that a Scotland player had touched down four times, and the first time altogether at Murrayfield, and Steyn, understandably, was a touch stunned by the whole experience.

“I’m absolutely buzzing - I can’t really put it into words,” the 27-year-old said after the match. “Gregor said before the game that it had been 600 days since we had crowds in, and I was like, shit that means it’s 600 days since I last played for Scotland. Just the whole day, the whole atmosphere about it, was incredible.

“I’ve had one hat-trick at uni level, but nothing like tonight. To be honest, you just get those days. Three of those tries were off set-piece plays where I get to dive over in the corner, and then for the other one, Blair [Kinghorn] puts in a cross-kick - he made me work a little bit for it, I couldn’t get to it on the full.

“Days like this - you want them to come round for so long, then they’re over in a flash. So I’ve just been trying to soak it in and enjoy it with the boys in the changing room.” 

When told he was the first Scot to score four tries in an international at Murrayfield, he added: “That’s incredibly special. Scottish rugby is steeped in so much history, so to have even a tiny part in that history is pretty humbling.”

It is not such a tiny part any longer, and, now that he has won a second cap at last, Steyn feels able to look back in good-humoured fashion about that frustrating year and a half which followed his first. “At one stage I thought someone didn’t want me to get a second cap. I was due to play Wales after France and that got canned the day before. Then we were lining up for the summer, with two opportunities there plus the A game, and we all know the story there.

“At one stage, I was like ‘Someone has it in for all of us, maybe I’ll just stay on one and that will be me!’.”

Steyn also had a word to say about McLean, who not only created his own tries out of next to nothing, but also began a counter-attack from deep inside his own half that eventually produced his fellow-winger’s third score. “We keep saying you know what he’s going to do, but because he’s so fast, it’s so difficult to defend,” he said of the 21-year-old. “I thought all of the debutants were brilliant, which was awesome to see.”