Andy Robinson, the Edinburgh coach, has pleaded with the club’s fans not to get too carried away after their demolition of the Scarlets over the weekend gave them their first win of the Magners League season. While the bonus-point victory was by far the best display of the competitive season, he pointed out, it was still far from perfect.

The two biggest worries for the coach was that the defence was patchy - periods of real aggression mixed in with periods when they stood off and allowed the Welsh to run at them - and that yet again they contrived to make a complete hash of too many clear-cut try-scoring chances.

“It should have been more, we butchered two open goals and in the case when Andy Turnbull [the wing] nearly had his head taken off I was screaming for a penalty try,” Robinson said. “It had to be, nobody was going to catch him, he was taken high by the last line in their defence. But we mustn’t get carried away. There is a lot we have to do.

“Some of the first-up tackling was poor, that is something we have to work on. A couple of times we allowed them to play and did not really get the line speed; other times we really snapped into it and you could see that they were not going to score against us. Once we made the substitutions we dropped off and allowed them to play as opposed to getting right into their faces and knocking them over.”

Despite that there were numerous positives for Edinburgh. Robinson reckoned that Phil Godman, the fly half, had produced his best tactical performance for the club since the coach arrived a year ago, mixing up his running and kicking games astutely; Chris Paterson revelled in the spaces offered to him at full back and produced his best game since before his spell with Gloucester; with a solid platform in front of him, Mike Blair was able to run things from scrum half; and Mark Robertson showed his scoring capabilities with two tries that should have been three.

Though Robinson did not mention it, the other reason for holding back on too much praise for the 32-14 win came from looking at the opposition. They came into the match with a 100 percent winning record but also with a string of injuries and they finished with 14 men after putting on all their replacements only for Stephen Jones, the fly half, to twist an ankle and leave the field.

When Kees Meeuws, the prop, went off they had lost the last fit tighthead in their squad, and were not able to compete to any great effect in the tight after that.

It all made it a very different prospect from taking on Leinster in the Heineken Cup, Edinburgh’s next home game now less than three weeks away after away games against Newport Gwent Dragons and Ulster. In that game they will be punished for missing tackles and squandering scoring chances.

And that is what happened to Glasgow on the same evening, losing 15-8 at Connacht. The only good news to come out of their game is that the hamstring injury that forced Dan Parks from the field after about half an hour is not thought to be that serious - leaving the pitch was described as a precautionary move by the club.