Few players can have encountered as many ups and downs as Andy Henderson in the two years since he made a memorable try-scoring debut for Scotland against Ireland. Yet he has come through them all, never wavering, never settling for second best. And here he is in Australia, while players such as Brendan Laney and Kevin Utterson, who have had trial runs in his favourite berth of inside centre, are back home in Scotland. Now it is just a case of waiting until the players find out the team to play Japan next Sunday and, against considerable odds, Henderson will be on his way to his World Cup debut.

At the same time, his tale is one of caution for the penny-pinchers at Scottish Rugby’s headquarters who, as part of an exercise to prune costs, have “mothballed” (or scrapped) the Scotland A team. If it had not been for that release for his rugby talents, who knows how long it would have taken Henderson to get back to the top.

The story really starts 28 months ago when Henderson, then a raw player with Glasgow Hawks, was plucked from obscurity to sit on the bench for the non-cap game against the Barbarians. He came on and did pretty well. A pro contract followed and, even better, he got to keep place on the bench when Scotland played the foot and mouth delayed international against Ireland, scoring the fourth of Scotland’s tries.

Further caps, a starting place four games later against Italy, and Scotland seemed to have the centre of the future in their hands. Then he ran into Brian O’Driscoll in Dublin and his inexperience was ruthlessly laid bare for all to see. His confidence shot to pieces, he was dropped for the rest of the Six Nations but still made it on to the summer tour.

“That finished up reasonably well for me,” he says, before recalling how the rise in his fortune soon came crashing down. “Then the season with Glasgow started up and that did not go well. I was in and out of the team. The autumn Tests came along and though I was not involved in the main team, at least I was in the A team. Everybody there feels they are just one step away, which is healthy. You know it is not a huge leap to get back into the senior squad, you see guys around you doing just that.”

Somehow or other he could not convince the new coaching partnership at Glasgow that being good enough for Scotland made him good enough for his club side. Of course, the full Test side was an impossible dream, but the national selectors kept faith and kept him in the A team. “I was not in the team and things at the club had started to go badly as well (a promising early start dribbled into a series of increasingly inept defeats). It was a difficult time rugby wise, but you cannot look too far ahead, just try to get involved in the Scotland stuff and hope something follows.

“I did not know what to do, I think I work hard all the time. All you can do is knuckle down, wait for your opening and play well in the limited chances you do get.”

If it had just been Glasgow, Henderson admits he is not sure how he would have handled the depression.

Luckily it was not. Again, through the spring, the A team came to his rescue and with the joint training sessions he knew the senior coaches knew exactly what he was up to. Then came the surprise call to join the tour to South Africa. “That was a huge lift,” he says.

The problem, without the A team, is what happens if another young player finds himself in the same position. Last season, the second string served a lot of valuable functions: it proved Jason White has to play if he is fit, it rescued Henderson’s career from a club schism, it allowed the selectors to welcome David Hilton back into the fold before putting him out to pasture.

“The South Africa tour was strange,” says Henderson.” We were in the same place almost the whole time and played only the two games, but for me, who had not been involved for a while, it was great just to be back in it again. The first test was pretty nerve wracking, I had not started a game for Scotland for more than a year, but the way we played was encouraging. It went well, though it turned into a big, big disappointment, a huge opportunity for us to win and we let it slip.”

Now, here he is on the big stage and not completely sure what to expect. “The group games are definitely not a given. Some people think we are expected to win the three games other than France but that would be ignorant and naive. We have to start with a good performance and take things on from there. The bonus points will make a difference and all the opposition is a bit of an unknown.

“But just to be involved is a big privilege. World Cups are a one-off, that was the overriding theme of the farewell dinner we had in Murrayfield. A lot of people will only play in one World Cup, there are good players who through injury and bad luck have never even managed that. It is a real honour to be here.”

If it goes well, it also means that, in his new job as director of rugby, Ian McGeechan, the coach, needs to start wondering how a first-choice Scotland player could have been so cold shouldered by his union-owned club, how they will stop that happening again and how they will cope with cases such as Henderson’s when they do not have an A team.