Usually it is home teams who talk about how the crowd can lift them, particularly if they are in Gloucester’s position of having lost their first two matches in this season’s Heineken Cup. This weekend, though, the visiting team from Edinburgh will be looking for inspiration from playing in front of a passionate, boisterous set of fans.

“We are really looking forward to playing at Kingsholm, it is a great place to play and they have such fantastic support,” Chris Paterson, the Edinburgh captain, said yesterday. “We know that the Gloucester pack will produce good ball but the dangers are likely to come from their attacking players.

“There is an exuberance and youthfulness about Gloucester this season. I have a lot of respect for them and the fact that they try to play a bit of rugby, which is not always the case with some teams in the Premiership.”

Not that Gloucester will be short of information about Edinburgh’s strengths and weaknesses, with Carl Hogg, last season’s forwards coach, having moved to the English club over the summer, along with Rory Lawson, last season’s back-up to Mike Blair at scrum half, who made the same journey south.

Lawson knows just what a different experience it is to play in front of a sell-out crowd at Kingsholm compared with a few thousand rattling round Murrayfield stadium filled to less than 10 per cent capacity.

“The crowd that were there always got behind us and made plenty of noise if we gave them something to shout about,” he said. “But it is not the same. One thing I had to get used to is the level of support. Kingsholm is unique and the people in the West Country really know and understand their rugby.

“There is a difference between rugby watchers and rugby supporters. In Edinburgh they respond if there is something to get them going, but here the noise is there all the time.”

Lawson is slowly winning over the fans, particularly after getting a run of starts last month before winning his debut Scotland cap in the final game of the autumn internationals, winding back the clock to last season as he trotted out on to Murrayfield to replace Blair, just as used to happen most weeks for Edinburgh.

Though he in a similar position at Gloucester, as back-up to Peter Richards, the England scrum half, he still believes that he made the right move, partly because the chances come when club and country clash and there are many more of those conflicts in England than in Scotland, where the Magners League just about shuts down during the international windows.

Lawson puts this down partly to his reckoning that Bryan Redpath, the Gloucester backs coach and a former Scotland scrum half, is teaching him enough new tricks to keep improving his game.

It will, he accepts, feel a touch strange to run on to the field to go up against players who were his colleagues for three years and are still close friends.

“That’s professional sport,” he said. “You know it will happen and have to be prepared for it.”

Both sides go into the game needing a win to keep their Heineken Cup hopes alive, with Gloucester probably needing to pick up a bonus point into the bargain.

For Paterson, though, the task for Edinburgh is simple. “We need back-to-back wins against Gloucester,” he said. “It is a huge ask and we will certainly need more of the same spirit that saw us through against Leinster.

“They have plenty of talent in the back line and, with players like James Simpson-Daniel and Anthony Allen around, playing a side with that freshness and not afraid of losing really excites me.”

• Scottish Rugby has finally filled the last vacancy among its management team with Kevin Johnson, who was once the commercial director for the Millennium Dome, being appointed to the same post at Murrayfield. His instructions are to increase the amount of money coming in and help to stem the losses that have driven the organisation’s debt to £23 million.