AS THE icy winds blasted round Murrayfield on Friday evening, it was all too worryingly easy to recall the words of the long-suffering Glasgow coach whose rueful assessment of his side's less than resolute qualities in the face of adversity. When the going got tough, he groaned, his lot usually went skiing.

Something equally damning could be said at the other end of the M8, where Edinburgh have traditionally thrown a mighty fit of the vapours at the sight of the season's final straight. Far from being bolstered by the return of their so-called star names from Six Nations duty, they have shown all the resolve of a deflating blancmange, last year's return of just one win from their final six Magners League matches being only the most recent episode of the long-running horror show.

Yet in the extremity-shrivelling conditions in which they took on Connacht on Friday, there was something truly heart-warming about Edinburgh's approach. Yes, they spluttered a bit through a first half that gave them a 10-8 interval lead, but their misfires were not failings of will. And with a couple of tweaks here and an adjustment there at half-time, they were worth every point of a final score of 38-8 that was their biggest win of the season.

Credit, then, to Andy Robinson? Has the former England coach found the secret to arrest the springtime slide that has seen Edinburgh tail off alarmingly at the dog end of most recent seasons? With a sequence of remaining matches that reads Cardiff, Glasgow, Leinster, Ospreys, Llanelli, you would hesitate to hail his transformative powers just yet, but there was real character in the way Edinburgh swatted feisty Connacht aside.

Had Robinson known that the arrival of spring generally coincided with the departure of Edinburgh's bounce? "I'd heard about it," he said as he lingered at Murrayfield long after supporters had melted into the capital's night. "If you look at the run-in we have there are some tough matches to play.

"All five matches are hard, so we have to work hard in training and in the games. But I'm pleased with the team spirit and the attitude, so what we do will not be for the want of effort. All the international players have come back wanting to play. That was a credit to them after a really tough Six Nations."

Perhaps the smartest piece of the Robinson strategy was to rest some leading players when Edinburgh played their final Heineken Cup pool match against Toulouse two months ago. Having discussed the programme with Frank Hadden, and in view of the fact that the game was already a dead rubber, Robinson reasoned that there was more to be gained from having those players fit and raring to go when they got back to their day jobs after their exertions with Scotland.

So they a gentle reintroduction when they clocked in at Murrayfield on Monday? Yes and no. With many still nursing bruises acquired during Scotland's defeat to Italy two days earlier, Robinson slipped into Florence Nightingale mode and told the poor dears to take it easy. And when they turned up the next day he told them to get off their backsides and get to work.

"We upped the pace of training," he explained. "It was a challenge to everyone to say, OK, this is what we're about'. I think we got a response."

Given the speculation about Robinson's prospects of stepping into Hadden's Scotland shoes one day, it can be counted one of the most impressive features of Robinson's way of doing things that he values Edinburgh as a club in its own right, an entity that can succeed independent of the national team. If the raison d'etre of Scotland's professional sides is to feed the needs of the Test team, it is also their fatal flaw, an inbuilt distraction for their players.

As befits a man who played for Bath between 1986 and 1997, an era in which the West Country outfit established themselves as one of the greatest club sides of all time, Robinson has a sense of the group dynamic, that combination of inner bonding and inner competitiveness, that turns a decent bunch of individuals into a real team. There was a lovely cameo of that on Friday when lock Craig Hamilton, playing perhaps his best game for the side, made way for Matt Mustchin, who duly delivered a performance of turbo-charged indignation.

Can they kick on? "Let's be frank here," said Robinson, apparently oblivious to the pun. "We've only won one game. We've got a number of games and we have to perform in all of them.

"We're better talking about this at the end of the season, when we can see where we are. It's OK to talk about winning one game, but we've got to back it up next week and in the other games that we have."

All true, of course. All good advice. But you would still back the Edinburgh side of Robinson to deliver more confidently than you would have backed a few of its predecessors.