Canada have made four changes from the side that gave Wales a shock, before finally going down 34-13, as they prepare to face Scotland in Aberdeen on Saturday. Nearly all of the switches the have been forced on the side by injuries and unavailability, the most frustrating being the loss of Ander Monro, whose Italian club ordered him back only a few days before he was due to face the country where he was brought up.

Yesterday, Kieran Crowley, the Canada coach, admitted it was unfortunate that one of his key players should have been removed just before the game, but he insisted that it was better for his team in the long run that as many as possible should win professional contracts, and he would do nothing to put a European club deal at risk.

Monro, the grandson of Hector Monro, the former Secretary of State for Scotland, never quite managed to break into the top rank when on the books at Edinburgh, being consigned to playing most of his rugby with Heriot’s. Now he will miss out on the chance to show Scotland what it lost when he switched allegiance to the country of his birth.

Crowley has been forced to bring in Matt Evans at fly half, and there are also new faces on the wing – where Sean Duke wins his first cap – and two of the front row.

“Winning is an aim, though not an expectation. I don’t believe you can have expectations like that,” Crowley said. “We have to worry about our game and if we reach some of our targets then the result will look after itself. We are aiming to keep developing. There are areas that did not go well last week, and we are looking at addressing them. Even those that did go right need improving further. I just hope we can tick a couple of boxes and say we have made progress.

“You have got to realise the standard we are playing against does not get any better than this. It would be great to have played, for example, against a side like Georgia, who are just above us [in the world rankings], though we have never played them. Having said that, we are really looking forward to this week.”

The older heads in the Scotland camp will remember hearing just as downbeat an assessment of Canada’s chances the last time the two countries played, six years ago in the Thunderbird Stadium in Vancouver, and if there is any risk of complacency, their colleagues will remind them what happened that day – Scotland lost. The result meant that, for Mike Blair, the Scotland captain on Saturday, it turned his national debut into the proverbial bittersweet experience.

“Obviously, I was amazingly proud to get my first cap, but we lost the game so there were mixed emotions,” he said yesterday. “We’d played them the previous week as a Scotland XV against what they called Rugby Canada, which was pretty much their full-strength team, and we’d won by two or three tries, playing pretty well in the process. That goes to show the strength we are up against. They’ve shown against Wales, and in parts against Ireland, what they’re capable of doing. The big test for us is to show what progress we’ve made.”

It is also a game where Scotland have to start getting rid of the “gallant loser” tag, according to John Barclay, the flanker who will be winning his seventh cap at the weekend. “In the professional era, people very quickly forget that we ran these teams close,” he said. “In the last few games, we’ve played well but had nothing to show for it, so if Scotland are to be taken seriously we have to win these games. Not just one-off games, but win them regularly.

“We often talk about making progress, but you can only talk about that so long before people get bored. They want to see results. If we’d won against New Zealand and South Africa it would give us massive confidence and if you can get a few wins like that under your belt it tends to have a snowball effect. It builds momentum.

“You can only take so much from a loss and the Scottish people want to see us win. Nobody likes losing – I hope.”

Canada team

J Pritchard; S Duke, C Hearn, R Smith, R Mensah-Coker; M Evans, E Fairhurst, K Tkachuk, M Pletch, S Franklin, T Hoston, J Jackson, J Sinclair, A Kleeburger, A Carpenter. Replacements: F Walsh, M Burak, S-M Stephen, M Williams, N Hirayama, B Keys, AN Other.