Let’s start with a simple Christmas wish of Glasgow head coach Dave Rennie ahead of a much anticipated 1872 Cup return leg: Don’t drop Adam Hastings.

After Edinburgh maintained their ascent towards the Guinness PRO14 elite on Saturday with as fine an enwrapping of their Scottish rivals as you’re likely to see under a Christmas tree, there are many questions that will be occupying Rennie’s mind as he plots revenge over a grinning Cockerill.

Bang in the centre will be what to do about the 10 jersey. Hastings ‘handed’ Edinburgh winger Duhan van der Merwe his brace of tries that ultimately proved the difference on the Murrayfield scoreboard in the first 1872 Cup clash of the season.

As someone who can still vaguely remember his moments at stand-off as a teenager, one would argue that there is much else going wrong around the pivot – and much more praise due to the interceptor and the tactics of his team – than is ever truly acknowledged, than simply it coming down to stray passes.

Having been fortunate enough to watch many stand-offs, home and abroad, at close quarters, I can’t think of many, perhaps any – including the great Johnny Sexton, Dan Carter, Andrew Mehrtens, Jonny Wilkinson and our own Gregor Townsend and Finn Russell – who have not been guilty of being intercepted at one time or another.

If a stand-off told me he hadn’t in his playing career, I’d be wary of a player who never passed unless 100%€ sure of it hitting its target. That’s just not rugby.

So it is a rite of passage for stand-offs, and perhaps more now than ever as they are seeking to create small advantages in a field where space has shrunk.

The first question for Rennie this week is will his team benefit from a reshuffle and perhaps return to 10 of Peter Horne, another player who knows what Hastings was going through after the final whistle on Saturday. He has plenty of options that that would be a straightforward call and probably have no negative impact on the team.

We could not argue if he wanted to send a message to Hastings that costly mistakes fall below the standards he demands, by leaving him out. Sports psychology is a complicated beast.

But the second question he has a duty to ask himself, as a coach responsible for getting the most out of every one of his players, is will Hastings benefit more from being dropped to the bench or from swiftly taking the reins again? Rennie backed the youngster on Saturday night and said that Hastings would learn from the lessons. He will if he plays.

The only place a player truly learns from mistakes is back on the field going through similar plays and taking a different option, and so Hastings needs to be shown confidence and asked to lead the team, to exorcise the demons and bury the memories of those passes somewhere deep inside his head, and replace them with the confident, ambitious thoughts that have made him the promising, exciting Scotland stand-off he has become over the past year.

All sports people I have ever interviewed tell you of horror moments, times they made great cock-ups and doubted themselves, and ultimately found the resilience to bounce back. In fact, such moments as Hastings suffered at Murrayfield are necessary as they create the resilience and mental toughness vital for players to thrive in international sport.

His international coach Townsend knows that only too well and quoted the great Liverpool FC manager Bill Shanky in his autobiography: ‘Courage is the ability to get up when things are getting you down, to get up and fight back.’

As apposite is another Townsend quote: ‘Good judgment comes from experience, and experience – well, that comes from poor judgment.’ That was from A. A. Milne.

For the benefit of Hastings, Glasgow and Scotland, Rennie would be wise to let the youngster have another crack to develop experience, rather than stew on the bench with no opportunity to take the next step forward. And if Hastings starts, do not be surprised if he steers Glasgow to victory and wins the Man of the Match. That is sport and the pendulum swinging nature that grips us to it.

Merry Christmas one and all!.