Edinburgh head coach Richard Cockerill is refusing to take anything for granted after Edinburgh took a huge step towards the Guinness Pro14 play-offs by winning at the home of one of their closest rivals.

Victory took his side back top of Conference B, above Munster, while the Scarlets are now six points behind in third.

Even better, the match-winning performers will still be available to Cockerill through the Six Nations period, with Fijian No 8 Bill Mata named as man-of-the-match and South African win Duhan van der Merwe scoring one try and making the other.

There was also good news for Scotland with lock Grant Gilchrist proving his readiness to step into the breach vacated by injured lock Johnny Gray, a 51-minute appearance that certainly allowed him to practice defensive duties.

“The whole squad effort was really good,” said Edinburgh head coach Richard Cockerill. “Gilchrist will probably be involved next weekend for Scotland, but he wanted to play.

“It’s good the Scotland management realised that guys need minutes. All round it was a big Scottish effort.”

“Gilchrist was under time constraints because of national duty and he may well be involved in the 23 with Scotland.”

Cockerill will be without most of his Scotland squad players against Connacht and Cardiff Blues, but will be pleased to be returning home for those clashes.

“We won’t take anything for granted. Connacht and Cardiff are good sides and they can easily beat you,” he said. “We’ll come in Monday dust ourselves off and prepare for next weekend.

“We play Connacht without our internationals and we have two games in South Africa where it will be very hard.

“There’s lots of big games to play including Munster. We’ve played 11 and we are in and around the top of the conference but it means absolutely zilch until we get to round 21.

“Bill Mata grafted and I’ll have to remind him of this performance for other games. We know how good Bill is. Normally we are talking about how good he is when he’s got the ball and attacking.

“He’s a good team man who works very hard. If he didn’t want to tackle, I wouldn’t pick him as it doesn’t matter how good he is going forward. Tonight was about grafting and working hard. It was about looking at the scoreboard at the final whistle and going ‘Ah, OK, it’s us.’

“There’s parts of Duhan’s game he doesn’t like. He doesn’t like running backwards in the wind and trying to catch the ball.

“If he’s on the front foot he’s so quick that he can cause some damage. We had two opportunities and we took them.

“In the end that was the difference along with the grit and determination of our defence. In these games if you get a couple of cheap scores which they probably were, well taken but cheap to be fair, it’s really hard to chase down in this weather.

“It could easily have gone either way.”