Eight of Laidlaw’s Hurricanes players are in Dave Rennie’s touring squad and it might have been double figures had injury not taken a number of others out of the reckoning.
Laidlaw is a New Zealand passport holder now, but he’ll be on Scotland’s side on Saturday.
“You’re gonna see New Zealand’s strongest possible team, but there’s no reason why Scotland can’t win,” he reckons. “It’s been a bounce of the ball here and there [in recent games].
“Scotland are definitely knocking on the door. I want Scotland to beat the All Blacks and I want the All Blacks to win every other game.”
He was 30 when he left Scotland for Taranaki, as a skills coach on the north island. Given his upbringing he always had a curiosity in him. His father always spoke about being a student of the game.
“I just thought there must be different ways to look at the game and different ways to look at life, really,” he explains.
“I used to go and pass my rugby ball against a tree at lunchtime and train at night. I used to say to the old boys, I wasn’t going to be staying here.
“They’d be like, ‘Yeah, you’ll be here’. I just knew I didn’t want to be there for 20 years. It’s not like I had a bad life in Scotland.
“I had a great job at East Lothian Council and I was coaching Jed-Forest. But I was curious to see what was outside of those big walls in Jed.”
New Zealand has changed him, he says. Not just as a rugby man, but as a husband and father. The Maori and Pacific Island culture has influenced him in a substantial way, knocking some rough edges off his personality.
“Being around so many different people from different backgrounds took a little bit of my aggressive Scottish side off me,” he says.
“Not too much, I hope. I have more empathy and more of an understanding side and I certainly didn’t have that when I was younger.”
That process started during his wildly successful years on the Sevens beat.
“The types of athletes we would bring in were often young, so it became an environment where we did have to look after each other,” he says. “We had to look after young players.
“Mums and dads were sending their kids off to the Sevens. It was the first time they were leaving home. So we did have to have a caring element to that programme as well as driving them forward.”
