Tommy Seymour may be part of a Glasgow Warriors set-up that is expected to have considerable influence on how Scotland set out to play this autumn, but the British & Irish Lion baulked at drawing too much comparison between the challenge of Test rugby and the step up to playing European competition which saw them fall short last month.

Unbeaten in the Pro14, the Warriors failed in their bid to get their European Champions Cup off to a winning start, defeats at the hands of Exeter Chiefs and Leinster meaning they are almost certainly out of the competition after just two pool matches.

The parallels with having to raise their game to another level when facing Samoa, New Zealand and Australia over the next three weekends might seem obvious, then, as they prepare for their first home matches under former Glasgow coach Gregor Townsend, but Seymour was dismissive.

“I don’t want to get too bogged down in the Glasgow stuff. We are in international camp about and we have three big tests,” he said. “To talk about Glasgow is somewhat irrelevant really. In this environment we have a whole different catalogue of players and a whole new set up and way of going out to approach these three games to how we might approach games at Glasgow. The European stuff has obviously not gone the way we wanted, while the league has been brilliant. We know there will be a massive step up to the international side of things. We are fully aware of the challenges we will face in the next three games and we will approach them as a Scotland side, not as a set of individuals coming from various set-ups.”

Clearly the biggest challenge will be facing New Zealand’s All Blacks since Scotland have not beaten them in 30 meetings stretching back more than a century, but having been part of a Scotland side that was given a massive fright by the Samoans at the 2015 World Cup Seymour acknowledged that the opening match carries considerable risks.

“They have some incredible athletes across the park and it’s not just the size, it’s the agility and the capacity to be athletic,” he noted. “We’ve had a couple of really close games against Samoa, especially in the World Cup pool game. They really put us seriously under the pump in the first half and we were perhaps fortunate to be where we were at half-time because they played the better rugby in the first half.

“Every time they scored we managed to peg them back and that allowed us to be in a position to compete for the game at the end, but we don’t expect any different from them this weekend. People pick up that physicality and the big hits because it’s the most obvious thing about their game but they have a lot of subtlety too. There are a lot of guys who play in our league so I know them on a club level and there are some class rugby players who know how to play the game, who are about more than banging through and bruising bodies, who really do like to play and expansive and entertaining brand of rugby.”