John Barclay: It was a bad day at the office, difficult to take

THERE is only one way I can describe that performance and that is “unacceptable”. In the first three games of the Six Nations we were definitely going the right way, but not yesterday, and that is very difficult to take, and to understand.

It was a bad day at the office all round and, if I had to put my finger on one problem, it is that we simply made too many errors. Our defence in particular was unacceptable, and you haven’t been able to say that about many Scottish defensive performances in recent years.

We dropped the ball too often and gave away penalties that we would never normally concede, and their tries were of the soft variety, frankly.

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The general feeling in the dressing room afterwards was that we should have stopped all of their tries but we didn’t and that’s strange, because our defence has been a dominant factor in our matches recently.

Nor am I going to make the excuses about losing players. Nick De Luca’s late withdrawal was sad for him, but Max Evans was a more than useful replacement. When Lee Jones went down I could see that he was out before he hit the deck so we had to make a change there, too. As I say, no excuses, we have a strong squad and, on the day, we collectively weren’t good enough.

All in all, it was just a very disappointing display overall, not least because we started well and got the ball wide, which was our gameplan. For the first 20 minutes or so we were attacking the way we wanted to, except that we never quite made it over the try line. I have no idea at the time of writing what the stats say, but I am pretty sure we completed a lot of passes. Statistics can be misleading, though, and I just thought we dropped too many balls out wide in particular.

That being said, Ireland defended well and took their chances, unlike us. They scored tries, and yes, we got one but there is no way that you can concede 22 points in a half of international rugby.

Realistically, if you are going to win a Test match you just can’t afford to give away points like that and it’s the first time in many matches that we have done so.

We matched them in the scrums in the first half, but in the second half they really got a shove on and they made it very tough for us.

Now we have to look forward to Italy and the one thing we didn’t want – a contest against them to decide the Wooden Spoon. We are all gutted at the moment but we have a week to prepare for the match and we will lift ourselves for the final game, of that I’m certain.

We will work harder than ever and you can take it that we will certainly be looking at our defence as one of the main issues we have to tackle following yesterday’s poor show, which, I sincerely hope, was a one-off.