It being Groundhog Day one journalist couldn’t help making the correlation to Scott Johnson’s worryingly poor Scotland outfit. “It’s my job to see a silver lining,” was Johnson’s opening defence of this non-malignant showing.

It took Bill Murray 10,000 repetitive days to escape from Punxsutawney and the chains of February 2nd with an array of new skills. And, of course, the girl (in his case a bonnie lass named Andie MacDowell). It feels like Scotland are nearing that mark.

Backline
"Our backline are still growing as lads. The irony is they are doing the hard bit quite easily, putting themselves in positions by making half breaks. It's the finishing off. They were up against some wily customers today who have been around the block.

“I’d much rather been in the position of having the talent to create the difficult bit. I think we showed enough, with these inexperienced players, we can compete at this level.”

Many would beg to differ.

“Groundhog Day? I think with a bit of perseverance, time in the saddle, it will go at some stage. We are just going to have to patient.” Then some refreshing honestly: “The fact is to get better you got to acknowledge what you need to do. We are not running away from that. We may have to go to a dark place and bring some torches.”

Their major concern is kilted Kiwi Sean Maitland who suffered concussion when landing after competing aerially with Dave Kearney. His lower leg also appeared to fracture on impact with the turf.

“Well, he has woken up and found there are about three other ailments. We’ll see how he is in the morning.”