"Here he is," said a slightly over-excited voice at Murrayfield this week as Chris Cusiter walked through the door, "the superstar." Well, not quite. Not yet anyway, but expectations are high - perhaps too high. The problem for Scottish club rugby will be hanging on to one of the few gems in their treasury.

The scrumhalf made his Scotland debut exactly a year ago. Today, against Ireland, he will win his 14th cap and while Scotland have lost 11 times, Cusiter has done nothing but enhance his reputation to the point where he is arguably the only fit Scot with a chance of making the Test line-up for this summer's Lions.

So have wealthy men from the English Premiership been in touch? "I'll give you my agent's number if you want to talk to him," says the 22-year-old.

He is an engaging young man from a rugby-playing family who was three years into his law degree at Edinburgh University before becoming a professional with The Borders two seasons ago.

Roy Laidlaw, Lion, Scottish captain, 46 times capped and 15 years a national development officer with the Scottish Rugby Union (SRU), says Cusiter has the ability to become the best Scotland scrumhalf ever; better than him, Bryan Redpath, Andy Nicol or Gary Armstrong. Laidlaw first saw Cusiter as a schoolboy. "His qualities were obvious right away," he says. "In particular, Chris has that blistering turn of pace. I think Chris has the qualities to be the best scrumhalf out of us all. He is a real competitor."

Last week, when Scotland came so close to beating France in Paris for the first time since 1999, Nicol named Cusiter his man of the match, which was something considering the efforts of the Scottish back row, in particular Jason White and Jon Petrie, in silencing the Stade de France crowd and rendering the French midfield dull and sterile.

Cusiter took a black right eye away from Paris, but it's about the only bad thing to have happened to him in a Scotland shirt. So how has he coped with the almost constant flow of adulation? "You learn first not to believe your own press," says Cusiter, who had just emerged from a sea of cameras, microphones and Scottish journalists desperate to write about something uplifting rather than the committee-room arguments of who runs their game. "It makes me almost push away and ignore it. It's nice, but I've got a long way to go."

Cusiter says he is "quite a private guy", keen to get away from rugby and happiest with the friends he made at university. But he did get a wrist band and card from Clive Woodward at Christmas - "aye, one of about 160" - and this week has been training under the eye of the man who will take the Lions to New Zealand in the summer.

"I met him briefly," says Cusiter. "He's been at training all week and we had a quick chat, but the summer seems a long way off, to be honest. I've enough on my mind just concentrating on the Six Nations without thinking what might happen down the line."

And there is also the pressure of deciding whether to stay with The Borders, at the bottom of the Celtic League, though improving under former England scrumhalf Steve Bates. If the SRU did decide to reduce their regional sides from three to two, The Borders are favourites for the chop. Bates, said Cusiter, would be an important factor in any decision to move south.

"It's an important decision. It hasn't been ideal with everything that has been going on the SRU the last while," says Cusiter. "The politics just take over."