THE collective theme from the Scotland squad over the past few days is that they cannot be distracted by the three-week suspensions imposed on Jonny Gray and Ross Ford, and instead must concentrate on Sunday’s quarter-final against Australia. It is no doubt the correct approach to take - playing against the Wallabies is hard enough without being distracted by lingering resentments of the Rugby World Cup’s disciplinary procedures - but it must be hard for the players to put the case entirely out of their minds.

Richie Gray, in particular, has to find it difficult. Not only is his younger brother one of the two banned players, the pair play in the same position. What is more, Scotland’s strength at second row has already been challenged once by the loss to injury of Grant Gilchrist. Now the elder Gray brother has to form a new partnership with Tim Swinson, as well as taking responsibility for calling the lineouts - a task that would normally be filled by Jonny.

“When I heard the ban was given it was very upsetting,” Gray admitted. “On a personal front I feel for both guys, and I feel for my brother. I just have to put that to the side and get on with things.

“Without going into it too much you feel a few things obviously. Anger, disappointment. The reality is that you have you to get over it pretty quickly, because there’s a big game at the weekend.

“I don’t want to get too much into it. The big focus is the game at the weekend.

“Yeah, we are disappointed to lose the guys but we have to come together and put in a performance for ourselves, for these guys. We don’t want to let ourselves down.”

As always in a game against such a gifted team, there will be a fine line for Scotland between doing enough to counteract Australia’s virtues and going too far down the defensive route and neglecting to express their own more positive strengths. That is perhaps one reason why team members have insisted since the start of the week that Scotland will go out to take the game to the former world champions. If part of the game will be about stemming the Australian tide when they have the ball, perhaps an even more important part will be denying them possession at source.

The trouble is, as Vern Cotter discussed yesterday, the Wallabies are an excellent all-round team. When they last won the World Cup in 1999, defence was their strong point - they only conceded one try all tournament, and that was in a match against the United States which they won in relative comfort. This time round they are still as formidable in defence, as they showed last week when denying Wales a try despite having two men in the sin bin, but are just as impressive in attack, where centres Matt Giteau and Tevita Kuridrani are likely to be especially prominent.

“It will be very difficult,” Gray acknowledged. “We’ve been very impressed by what we’ve seen. They’ve played some great attacking rugby, and against Wales they held them out with 13 men, but we have a game plan and we need to front up physically.

“We have an expectation of what’s going to come at us. We aren’t going to worry too much as we need to get our stuff right. If we have to think just about them we’ll have a long day. We’ve had three training sessions - one tomorrow - to think of things. By the weekend we'll be flying.

“It’s a pressure situation. Huge occasion. You play rugby for the fun of it and go out there and have a crack at one of the best teams in the world. We will go out there and enjoy ourselves, making tackles, hitting rucks.”

As the tallest man in the team at 6ft 10in, the 26-year-old will have a big role to play in taking the game to the Australians, not only in the lineouts, but also in the loose. He and his younger brother are at the top of the tackle charts - not only for Scotland but for the whole tournament - but it would not go amiss if he were to become equally prominent in ball-carrying, as he was earlier in his international career.

There is another vital figure at the other end of the height scale, of course, in captain Greig Laidlaw. and Gray was especially keen to pay tribute to the scrum-half’s leadership. “He’s a great boy,” he said. “Great leader.

“Against Samoa, things didn’t go to plan as we would like to in the first half. We were under the posts more than we would have liked to be in the first half. He brought us in and told us, ‘Boys, let’s calm down’.

“We kept things tight when we came out in the second half and put the squeeze on. He’s a calming influence, but you can see his will to win in everything he does. He’s a feisty character.”