Bryan Easson has made three changes to Scotland's starting fifteen for Saturday’s Six Nations wooden-spoon decider against Wales at Scotstoun and has challenged his players to be switched on for the full 80 minutes after leaving themselves with mountains to climb against England and Italy in their last two outings. 

Christine Belisle is named at loose-head prop, having previously played at tight-head for Scotland since making the switch from the back-row to the front-row last summer, with Leah Bartlett dropping to the bench. Meanwhile, Jenny Maxwell gets her first start of the championship at scrum-half, while Hannah Smith returns at outside-centre after missing last weekend’s defeat to Italy because she was at a training camp with the Team GB 7s squad. 

“We just felt the way we want to play the game, we're getting a little bit more from Christine around the pitch,” explained Easson. “Leah’s a really good scrummager but it's been evident over the last couple of weeks that she's not played a lot, so we’ve gone with the addition of a little bit of size in the front row, and defensively Christine brings that little bit more energy, especially at the ruck area where we know the Welsh are very physical. 

“It’s great to see Jenny back,” he added. She has been out for a long time with her ACL and when she came on against Italy she brought a little more tempo to the game which is exactly how we want to play against the Welsh anyway, so that was a fairly simple one for us."

“With Hannah coming back, Lisa Thomson slots back to her favourite position of 12, and Helen Nelson returns to 10, so that was also an easy call to go back to players in positions they are happier in.” 

Easson added that he has been blasting an air-horn during this week in training to try to ensure that the players are not caught napping at crucial moments. 

“If we’re doing a handling, speed or contact drill, as soon as the air-horn goes they have to run straight from whatever they’re doing into an attack drill or a defence drill,” he explained. “What we’re trying to do is make sure they can go from being totally focused on one area of the game and immediately change into something else. Games are full of peaks and troughs and when something changes you’ve got to be ready to move into that. 

“We’ve talked about belief in winning, but now it’s just a case of saying: ‘We know we’re going to win, let’s just put a little bit of pressure on ourselves to say go for this one.’ And we’ve trained accordingly.” 

Scotland (v Wales at Scotstoun Stadium on Saturday @ 5pm): C Rollie; E Musgrove, H Smith, L Thomson, M Gaffney; H Nelson©, J Maxwell; C Belisle, L Skeldon, M Kennedy, E Wassell, L McMillan, E Gallagher, R McLachlan, S Cattigan. Replacements: J Rettie, L Bartlett, L Cockburn, N Howat, M McDonald, S Law, E Wills, R Shankland.