That dual playmaker ploy has been used to considerable success by England under Jones, with Saracens fly-half Owen Farrell taking up the 12 jersey in order to accommodate Leicester schemer George Ford.

The Murrayfield crowd who turned up to see Saturday’s eight-try demolition job on Fiji got a brief glimpse of how the potential Hastings-Russell axis could work when the young Glasgow pretender was thrown on for the final nine minutes, with the pair even combining in the build-up to Hastings’ first ever Scotland try.

And the small taste of that partnership has got Hastings hungry for more.

The 22-year-old said: “Every good 12 is a very good talker. Obviously Finn plays 10 but if he moved out to 12 he will talk a lot.

“That helps you at 10, so I don’t see why it couldn’t work.

“Is it good to have that variation in the way we can play? It’s exactly that. We’d have two ball players at 10 and 12. We’ve seen it with England with Ford and Farrell and it’s worked quite well for them.

“You can swap and change, so it offers quite a lot of variety.

“It’s good for depth as well if you’ve got injuries and things like that.”

Townsend is likely to stick with the single stand-off approach and pack his midfield with muscle for this weekend’s clash with South Africa.

But it has already been made clear to Hastings he must not see himself as understudy to Russell and instead look to take the shirt off his former Warriors colleague’s back.

“Hearing Gregor say that gives me huge amounts of confidence,” he said. “Am I ready to challenge Finn for a start? Yeah definitely.

“I’ve obviously not played a huge amount of international rugby but hopefully over the next couple of weeks I’ll get some game time then moving onto the Six Nations, I hope to be picked for that.

“I’ll keep taking it one game at a time, though, as you can’t think too far ahead.”

The sight of a Hastings scoring at Murrayfield is nothing new considering the exploits of Adam’s father Gavin and his uncle Scott in a Scotland jersey.

Yet his maiden international score received the biggest cheer of the night last week as he galloped home with the broadest of grins to touch down the final score in the 54-17 trouncing of the Pacific Islanders.

“I spoke to Finn before the scrum and and mentioned it might be on for him to go short and thankfully it opened up,” he recalled, still smiling.

“It was a nice moment, he found me on the return and I had a nice 20 metres to take it all in.

“I don’t score many tries and the ones I do are usually right at the line so you’re not able to enjoy it.

“But this was nice. My family were there in the stands watching and it was at Murrayfield too. I’ve been wanting to play there since I was very young so it was a dream to score.”

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