At 6’4” and close to 18 stones, Josh Strauss looks a hard man to intimidate, but even the hirsute South Africa-born back-row forward sounded as if he felt he had encountered a super-human being when playing with and against the man who did most to take Scotland apart when they met Fiji last year.

That encounter in Suva was Strauss’s last Test appearance and, as he echoed the awe-struck tone of Scotland coach Gregor Townsend when discussing the individual capabilities of Fijian players, his admiration of former Glasgow Warriors team-mate Leone Nakarawa could not have been more vividly expressed.

“Playing against and with Naks, he is the only guy I know in world rugby who can stand upright with his arm in the air, get hit by three people and not really move,” said Strauss.

So formidable is the Fijian that Strauss came off second best even after a collision for which the Scottish international was sin-binned during their most recent encounter.

“The last time I tackled Naks I got a yellow card so I’ll try and wrap my arms around him this time,” he recounted.

"I tried to absolutely empty him, but because he is so heavy he almost broke my shoulder. I couldn't wrap my arm so I got done for a no-arms tackle. In my view it wasn't that bad. These days people get away with murder!

“He’s just a lovely guy. No matter how hard you hit him he’s just laughing at you. Last time, after the game he’s hugging me and stuff.”

What makes matters all the more difficult is that Scotland cannot pay too much attention to the former Glasgow Warrior, the scale of the broader threat demonstrated by the presence of Edinburgh’s Bill Mata, who is the latest Fijian to make a major impact in Scotland and there are plenty more besides them as Strauss, who now plays his club rugby in the English Premiership with Sale Sharks, acknowledged.

“Whenever you play against a team with a Fijian in the Premiership they are target men, which is a bit worrying when you are playing against 15 of them put together,” he pointed out.

“It is one of those things, if you do what we want to do well as a team, you train well and buy into it, if you execute the things you put out for the weekend and do it in the right mind-set, then the game is there for the winning [but] they are a special team. I have seen a bit of Bill Mata and he is an exceptional player – a big guy as well – so, if he’s playing, he’s another one to watch.

“The special thing about playing Fiji is the fact that they have so much flair and talent, and natural physical ability, which you don’t always get. In some teams you get guys who are very hard workers but maybe not the biggest people, whereas Fijians have got a lot of flair and power about them, so it’s a different game. It is something that you are maybe not that used to when you play northern hemisphere teams.”

Strauss’s view is doubtless influenced by the fact that his last international appearance was against him, the 32-year-old having been overlooked by the Scotland management ever since and admitting that he was surprised to have had the recall he received this week, after again being omitted from the original super-sized 40-man squad for this autumn Test series.

He admitted that Scotland had not been prepared for what confronted them last year, but at least that experience last summer taught him that opposing teams can no longer place too much reliance on the Fijians’ traditional frailty in the more technical aspects of forward play.

“We were quite surprised,” said Strauss. “All our analysis you do on them is about this flair-based, very loose game – offloads and all these things – but in the morning the rain was coming down and they just played a very structured and physical game, with forwards latching into each other and just trying to penetrate us that way.

“Obviously, they are a big team, a very physical team, you don’t probably expect them as much as other teams to play a set physical structure, they like having the ball loose, but all of sudden you saw a different Fiji team. I think the scary thing about Fiji is how big they are and they can play a flair-based game.”

As tough as all of that makes it sound, however, Strauss clearly believes that now that they have a better understanding of what they are up against, the team who are ranked fifth in the world and are playing on home soil, should not be going into this match having any doubt about their capacity to live up to their status on Saturday.

“You analyse those things and try to do as well as you can to counter what they are going to throw at you, but it doesn’t matter how flairy they are, you’ve got to hit them hard because they are all mountains of men and be physical. It is the same at the breakdown, if we play with quick ball I feel we’ll have an advantage because they might not have the fitness. We’ve just got to focus on the things we’ve got to do right to beat them.”