AFTER their best opening fortnight in the Six Nations Championship for 27 years, Scotland are sure to travel to France in a confident frame of mind next week.

Gregor Townsend's men have shown in their wins over both England and Wales that they are now a more mature and resilient side both mentally and physically than they have been for some time, and they will be buoyed by the knowledge that they won on their last trip to Paris two years ago.

Having said that, they are also determined not to become over-confident ahead of the match at the Stade de France a week on Sunday. The emphasis after the 29-23 victory at Twickenham was on the need to improve against Wales, and after Saturday’s 35-7 win against the Welsh, the theme in the camp was the same: further improvement will be required in round three.

The burgeoning self-belief within the squad may have produced headlines such as “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet”. But the internal message might be more accurately summed up as “We ain’t done nothin’ yet”.

READ MORE: Finn Russell on his renewed harmony with Gregor Townsend

So the squad need to strike a delicate balance between gaining self-belief from those first two results and ensuring that they keep their feet on the ground ahead of the tougher challenges to come. Grant Gilchrist, for one, is well aware of how important it is to strike the right note when the time comes to prepare for Paris.

“We’re going to take loads of belief, loads of confidence - but also we’re not going to get ahead of ourselves,” the Edinburgh lock forward said. “We know we can be better than we were on Saturday, and we know we’ll need to be in the games to come, which are going to be huge.

“But what an exciting place to be in, where you feel like you can improve, you can get better, but to be in that position of having won two games is massive.

“We’re not going to go either way. We’re going to take the confidence, take the good things, and know what we can do to teams when we play well. But we’re probably going to have to put together a longer performance.

“I don’t want to get carried away. We’ve not been in this position before, but we’ve been in similar positions where we’ve had big results. I’d say judge us at the end of the tournament.

“That’s how we’ve got to look at it. The days of having big days against England, a big day on Saturday against Wales... we should be judged at the end of the Six Nations. This team’s mindset now is that we’re not going to be getting carried away after two wins, it’s about where we end up at the end of the championship, and judge us then.”

READ MORE: Player ratings for Scotland after historic victory over Wales

Scottish teams may still in general prefer to be underdogs going into games, but the current national squad have shown they can handle the increasing burden of expectation that comes with successful performances. The fact that they had not won their first two matches since the Five Nations became Six had to play on their minds in the build-up to last Saturday; so too did Warren Gatland’s record of 11 wins and no losses against Scotland as Wales coach. But, as Gilchrist explained, rather than trying to shut out that background noise, they confronted it.

“I quite liked the pressure,” he continued. “Don’t shy away from it. We knew we had to deliver. We had a good result the week before, but we prepped last week to come and win a home Test match against Wales. And that came with a bit of pressure and a bit of expectation on us - we’re going to have to get used to that if we’re going to be a great team.

“Saturday was a good starting point for that, but the France week, you’ve done nothing, you’ve got to start from scratch again and build a week and then build a performance that wins on the Sunday.

“It’s going to be an exciting challenge. Playing in Paris is always special, always a battle, and one that we’ll be relishing.

“We’ll have to be better than we were on Saturday, we knew on Saturday that we had to be better than we were the previous week, and I think for us now we’ve set a standard and we’ve just got to keep getting better week in, week out.

“Like I’ve said, the wins on the first two weekends are good for us, they give us belief and confidence, but we can’t rely on that. We’ve got to prepare, and the way you prepare, and the way we perform, will determine whether we win or lose.

“But all these things give us that belief that if we prepare well and we perform well, we’ll win the game. I believe that.”