Edinburgh head coach Richard Cockerill has warned Scottish pro team supporters that the battle to remain competitive, whilst balancing international commitments with under-resourced squads, is going to last well beyond the end of the current season.

Monday night’s 14-43 defeat for the capital outfit at home to Ulster completed a clean sweep of losses against the four Irish provinces with the season only seven matches old, and Glasgow Warriors have had an equally demoralising time of it. The two sides have managed just two wins each so far in the 2020-21 PRO14 campaign, leaving the rest of the season looking more like an exercise in damage limitation rather than a quest to reach the play-offs.

All rugby governing bodies have been hit hard by the Covid crisis, but Scotland’s reliance on a smaller player pool has made it particularly vulnerable.

“This is not a problem that is going to go away, is it?” said Cockerill. “Our funds are going to get less, not more. There-in lies the trick of trying to manage this squad while having double figures of Scotland players away through Test match windows, and [we are] moving forward with smaller budgets.

“The concern for me is that this is going to be more of the norm. We were getting to the point when we were starting to compete with teams and my concern is that our budgets will be smaller for next year. That is just the nature of it.

“Our competitors don’t seem to be losing players or cutting budgets like we have, and Glasgow are the same. People have to understand where we are at.

“We have no [extra] budget and there will be none made available.”

Cockerill led Edinburgh to a top place finish in their PRO14 conference last season, and the quarter-finals of the Challenge Cup, but has not been able to build on that squad meaning he must now rely on a number of unproven youngsters and converted sevens-specialists to take on opposing sides filled with seasoned internationalists.

“If you look at Ulster over the summer, they recruited an All Black nine [Alby Mathewson] and an Irish international ten [Ian Madigan], while we lost our second choice ten in Simon Hickey, we lost Matt Scott, and we are not replacing them at all,” he reasoned. Despite his very obvious frustration, Cockerill insisted that he has no plans to walk away from the Edinburgh role.

“My job is to coach this team and work with my bosses and work through this,” he stated. “Work with Jim [Mallinder – the Director of Performance Rugby] and Mark [Dodson – Scottish Rugby’s Chief Executive] and we have to get through the other side of this.”

Edinburgh now have a weekend off before their international contingent return to camp next Monday morning ahead of their European Champions Cup campaign opener against La Rochelle on Saturday December 12.

“We will get them back but I don’t know where they will be at,” shrugged Cockerill. “It is always tough. We’ve never had an eight-week Autumn Nations Cup before and there is usually a post Six Nations hangover.

“The guys want to come back to play for their clubs but physically and mentally we will see where they are at. Some will have played a lot and some will not have played at all in the last three or four weeks. It is a less than perfect combination.

“We will pick as strong a side as we can in Europe and go as hard as we can. We’ve got to keep learning how to play and try to win those games. It is going to be very difficult across the two competitions this year and it doesn’t take a genius to work that out.”