Incentives there for Scots to repeat intensity of South Africa display

PLAYING Canada immediately after matches against New Zealand and South Africa offers an interesting test. Everyone knows it's a match that Scotland should win, and indeed win by a comfortable margin. Yet asking the eleven members of the XV that started against the Springboks to play with the intensity they displayed last week is a considerable demand. Obviously there will be no conscious slackening off.

The problem is to prevent an unconscious one. It's like asking Andy Murray to play a lower-ranked player immediately after matches against Federer and Nadal.

Fortunately there are incentives. The first is the determination to maintain the improvement shown this autumn, and to build on it. Defeat would be a major setback. So indeed would a narrow and scrambled victory.

Second, there is the question of the world rankings and their relevance to the next World Cup. To be frank, this is a somewhat tedious business. There was a case for retaining the old RWC seeding arrangement, whereby the quarter-finalists in the last Cup were the eight seeds for the next one. Reaching the quarter-final represents after all an unequivocal achievement. There is also a case – providing you take these world rankings as seriously as the IRB seems to do, for saying that the seeds for the next Cup should be determined by them, but that case collapses when you choose to make the cut-off point three years before the next tournament. It seems a strangely arbitrarily chosen date. The rankings in 2011 may well look very different from the rankings in December 2008. If the seeding is to be determined by these rankings, then it would have made better sense to wait and see how countries are ranked rather nearer the time.

As it happens, if we beat Canada and Argentina beat Ireland in Dublin, it seems that we will leap over Ireland to eighth position in the rankings and can forget about the whole business.

One of the interesting things this afternoon will be to see how Phil Godman performs. Partly because of the refusal to give Chris Paterson an extended run at No 10, the fly-half position has been unsatisfactory since Matt Williams unceremoniously shunted Gregor Townsend into premature retirement from the international game. Dan Parks has probably had more good matches than his detractors will allow, without ever looking a truly convincing international fly-half.

The same may be said of Godman. His development has been slower than might have been expected, and the weaknesses in his game are still evident. His kicking from hand is unreliable and inaccurate, and his judgement of when to run or pass and when to kick is erratic. Nevertheless there is a much better chance of playing an expansive game with Godman at 10, though if you want to play a kicking game you would obviously still choose Parks. Parks has, however, started at 10 in most of Scotland's matches over the last four seasons, and in that time we have met with little success. For this reason – even if there were no others – it seems sensible to give Godman a good run in the position. Hopefully he improves.

If he doesn't, we're in a fix. Very few teams succeed at international level without a fly-half capable of controlling a game and sparking off his back line. And the fact is that, at present, neither Parks nor Godman, even if eligible, would come close to being picked for Wales, England, France or Ireland. Indeed neither would be among the three or four fly-halves under consideration in England or Wales.

One looks this afternoon to see the Scottish front five establish an early dominance and then to see the back-row of Strokosch, Taylor and Barclay ranging the field both destructively and constructively. Perhaps the most interesting question however will be whether the Edinburgh centres Nick de Luca and Ben Cairns can display the attacking flair and intelligent collaboration they so often showed for Edinburgh last season (Cairns, of course, has scarcely played for his club this autumn). If they can, then Scotland should run riot.

One imagines that if we establish a good lead by half-time, some of the players who have borne the brunt of battle these last two weeks will be invited to take a well-earned rest. Certainly, if the game is going well, Mike Blair, described this week by a French journalist as an "imperial animator and leader", should be replaced by Rory Lawson earlier than usual. He has an awful lot of important rugby ahead of him over the next few months - and the same may be said of Euan Murray and Ross Ford. Indeed, if a convincing victory wasn't important, one would have been happy to see these three miss this match.