Standard slipped, says Barclay

SCOTLAND captain John Barclay believes his side learned a harsh lesson on Gregor Townsend’s first tour in charge that they will all do well to remember.

The back-row forward was bitterly disappointed at going from the high of being good enough to beat Australia in Sydney to the low of losing to Fiji seven days later.

‘What we learned on this tour is that if we play well we can beat some of the best teams in the world,’ said the Scotland captain, who had to go off on the hour mark after suffering a back injury.

‘But if we don’t and standards drop in any way, we won’t.

‘Last week we played one of the best teams in the world and came away with a win. The flip side is if we don’t play well we can make life very hard for ourselves, as we did against Fiji.

‘We have to be at our best to win games as events over the past two weeks have shown. That, for me, is the big lesson we have learned on this tour.

‘We took confidence from the good stuff in the win over Australia and also Italy, but we will learn a lot from the loss today as well.’

Barclay denied he had made the wrong decision by turning down the chance on eight occasions to take kickable penalty attempts in favour of putting the ball in the corner.

He argued that because Scotland were dominant in drives from the line-out, which resulted in two out of their three tries, it was the correct decision every time.

‘The only facet of our game we were better than them was our lineout drive,’ said the Scotland captain. ‘We picked up a couple of tries that way, so it worked.

‘Also in the first half the wind was against us and there were hard kicks out on the touchline, maybe 3040 yards out, so we thought the way we were going we would put it into the corner. They had two guys in the sin-bin for some of them, so the decisions were right but the problem was our poor execution.

‘Fiji played well and with a lot of physicality and grew as the game went on. They gained a lot of confidence from our errors and some of their offloading was top class.

‘They were better than us on the day.’