Six Nations: Glasgow team-mates have travelled very different roads but reach same destination

At 29, Kalman is nearer the end of his career than the start, while the reserve stand-off is just 20 and can look forward to many more caps. The burly prop has two degrees, one from Durham University and the other from Cambridge. One of his university modules was even titled “Rocket Science”, although Kalman insists that it was only so the lecturer could joke about how easy it was. Weir is more a University of Life graduate.

Weir talks Glaswegian; the big prop has the accent of a Radio Four announcer.

Kalman has played rugby at Whitecraigs since he was in short trousers; Weir only took to the game later in life after a stint playing football for Celtic boys and after an unrelated trip to the dentist, as he explains.

“When I was young my mum was really good at keeping me occupied rather than standing around street corners in Cambuslang,” says the Glasgow playmaker. “She took me to basketball and to badminton and to every sport under the sun. I played a lot of football when I was younger, but I saw a flyer for rugby in a dentist’s waiting room. I went along and I got hooked.”

One other thing that ties them together it is the fact that they were both down the Glasgow pecking order at the start of the season. Weir was behind Robinson’s favoured No 10 Ruaridh Jackson, who will test his hamstring injury in an outing for Glasgow against the Scarlets tonight at Firhill.

Kalman was third-choice tighthead behind Scotland’s Moray Low and Michael Cusak. Low is now injured and out of action, Euan Murray prefers to observe the Sabbath than play and Cusak is English.

Kalman looks a little bewildered by his elevation from the fringes of the Glasgow squad to the Scotland bench.

“I don’t know,” he says in answer to the obvious question: ‘What took you so long?’ “Some things take time. It’s not really a matter of when you get there, it’s more a matter of if you get there and, hopefully, I’ll take the chance I’ve got. Whether it’s injuries, form or whatever, you’ve got to take the chances when they come your way.”

While Kalman’s leap up the rankings says something about the paucity of options open to Robinson, it also speaks volumes of a man who never lost the dream throughout years as a journeyman pro.

Kalman points to an extended pre-season of heavy conditioning when Glasgow mirrored the World Cup squad’s schedule as part of his improvement. He said: “I reaped the benefit of a long, arduous pre-season. I was in the best physical shape I’ve ever been in and I carried that momentum through the season and I’m making the best of that now.”

If there is a cautionary sting to this tale it is revealed by Jim Thompson. The Edinburgh full-back sat on the bench in Argentina two years ago and everyone was adamant that Bill McLaren’s “other” grandson (Rory Lawson being the better known) would win his first cap. It didn’t happen and, since then, Thompson has slipped out of the national squad.

That fate shouldn’t befall Weir and Kalman. Unless Greig Laidlaw is so superior he cannot be withdrawn, the young stand-off seems likely to be thrown to into the Millennium cauldron at some point and, if the match is anything like two years ago, Weir could find himself playing anywhere in the back line. Props are nearly always called upon, and Kalman’s set-piece scrummaging is his strong point, as he proved in Scotland A’s 35-0 beating of England on Friday in Galashiels.

“The ‘A’ team game was massive, a great opportunity and one of the best team performances that I’ve been involved with,” he said. “It was one of the best forward performances and one that will stick in my memory for a very long time.”

But presumably not as long as the memory of his first cap, should it arrive on Sunday.