Now he is relying on them to help his team upset the odds against Bernard Laportes men in the final round of this seasons RBS 6 Nations Championship.

Having selected Nikki Walker and Sean Lamont on the Scottish wings, alongside Andy Henderson and Rob Dewey in the centre, Hadden has opted for four players with an average weight of around 16-and-a-half stone per man.

That makes them approximately two-and-a-half stone heavier per man than their French counterparts.

We think that these four guys as a unit could be a formidable physical presence, the likes of which the French will not have come across before, said head coach Hadden.

Weve got a picture of how we want to play this weekend, and we think this is the appropriate three-quarter line for us to do what we want to do.

It has been in the back of my mind for a long time that we actually have the capacity to play the biggest, most powerful three-quarter line that has ever taken the field wearing Scotland jerseys.

We have four big, powerful, athletic guys who will undoubtedly ask questions of any backline in the world.

There are a few principals of play that we like our players to think about before they take the field, but obviously as some of our young fellas who are coming through get bigger and stronger we have options to do what we have never had options to do before, which is take a far more direct route to the gain line - and not just from set-piece, but also from broken play.

That is an option we may well look at this weekend, but we certainly dont want to be going to Paris with only one way of playing.

We certainly dont want to go into the World Cup with only one approach to the game, and its important that we have a number of tools at our disposal that make it continually difficult for defences to guess what we are going to do next.

To accommodate the giant backline, Hadden has asked Rob Dewey to move from inside to outside centre, so that Andy Henderson can start in the number 12 jersey.

Hadden has resisted the temptation to make that switch in the past because he believes that the outside centre channel is the hardest on the park to defend - however he feels Dewey is now ready for the role.

The Scotland coach said: He has not played a massive amount of professional rugby games and we felt starting him in a position he was familiar with was the way forward at the time, but hes got a few more games under his belt now.

I would have liked to see Rob Dewey at 13 before now, were it not for injury.

We actually planned to do this in the second game in November, but he got injured against Romania in the first and we were unable to do that.

Rob didnt have a good game last weekend, but hes just a young fella and hes got undoubted potential, and I want him to prove he can shake that off with a special performance this week.