With his accurate goal kicking and ability to take pressure off his team with long and accurate touch finders, it would have been easy to think that Dan's talents were restricted to his boot. Some of us have had little doubt of the talents Dan possesses but knew that he required time to achieve the physical conditioning required to display all those skills at the highest level.
In coming from a semi-professional club set-up in Sydney it was going to take Dan time to adjust technically and physically to the full-blown professional game in Europe. We're now seeing the results of his hard work and it looks like he's added quite a few new names to his list of fans.
Talking to Alasdair Reid in today's Sunday Herald Dan says: "When I first started playing for Glasgow I realised I was about six kilos overweight. But I dropped that within two or three weeks, just through being in the environment of professional rugby. I struggled to put weight on, but during the off season I had six weeks of just eating and training. I'd like to put on more weight but it's hard to do that when you're playing."
Dan estimates he has recovered about half the weight he lost, but it has returned as muscle and he is now a markedly more confident player in the more robust areas of the game. Some of the credit for that change can also be taken by Mark Bitcon, the Glasgow fitness coach, who identified in Dan the same problems he had seen in Alex King, the skilful but slightly-built fly-half he had worked with at Wasps.
"At Wasps, we did target Alex," Mark said. "He worked a lot in the gym over the past two years to be a lot more physical and you can see that in his defence now, which is not the weakness it was before. That's something we're looking to try and do with Dan. He has stepped up to the plate and in all the sessions he has done with me he has been fantastic. Hopefully, in the next couple of years, we can take it as far as we can in terms of physicality."
As Mark says, Dan's defence has developed dramatically since last season and Dan Tells Iain Morrison in today's Scotland on Sunday: "It had always been a part of my game that I'd never had to worry about," Dan admitted on his occasionally wayward defence, "but it was exploited in the professional game."
In the same article backs coach Sean Lineen says of his playmaker: "Dan is a very good player, and now that his physical conditioning is improving, he has far more confidence than he used to, and it shows on the pitch. Dan is a confidence player, and right now he is full of confidence, talking throughout the match."
Iain Morrison gives the final word goes to Sean: "Dan, he's not bad for an Aussie."
Praise indeed from a New Zealander.
You can read Alasdair Reid's Sunday Herald article here and Iain Morrison's Scotland on Sunday article here