John Barclay: The ref just gave a Gallic shrug of his shoulders...

ONCE again, the feeling after an international match was one of frustration. A week after the England disappointment, there was even more weight to the disappointment we are all feeling after losing to Wales, because we are dominating large parts of games yet not getting the results.

Had we gone in at half-time having converted our pressure late in the first half into points, things might have been so different. Instead we went in at 3-3 and then, within 16 minutes of the start of the second half, we were down by three tries and had lost two men to the sin bin.

Against England it was four minutes of madness, in Cardiff it was 14 minutes of chaos. It wasn’t just one error, it was several mistakes that we made, and you cannot do that in an international Test match.

Yet we rallied and came back and, apart from those errors, there wasn’t that much between the teams, which was not what people were saying before the game. Even after losing their captain Sam Warburton shortly before the match, Wales were still a formidable side but, if we had got some more points on the board and given ourselves a cushion at half-time, perhaps the result might have gone in our favour.

Indeed, as I was warming up with the other replacements behind the posts when we had those 20-odd phases of play just before half-time, I can tell you Wales looked knackered. I thought “we’ve got them here” as the team was looking great and playing some pretty good attacking rugby. But we just didn’t get that try which would have boosted our confidence.

We made many more passes than Wales, and they had to make many more tackles than us, which suggests that we just weren’t dangerous enough. Other teams with that amount of possession, and who had run up 20 phases of play, would have scored but we didn’t manage that. Instead there was a knock on and that allowed them to go in at half-time thinking they had taken everything we could throw at them.

As we rallied in the last quarter, it didn’t help that French referee Romain Poite called a knock on and disallowed Stuart Hogg’s try just as we were building momentum.

Chris Cusiter told the referee the replay would prove him wrong, but he just gave a Gallic shrug of his shoulders.

In general I would have to say there were some really good elements to our game. Our scrum and lineout are strong, and that’s definitely a plus for the way we want to play. And we did finish strongly – we thoroughly deserved Greig Laidlaw’s try.

For myself, coming on to replace an injured colleague is never satisfactory but I felt I had a good 40 minutes, and got on the ball a lot. With it being confirmed that Alasdair Strokosch has broken his hand, that may open a door for me. But, although I am not happy to sit on the bench, it’s never good to get a chance in that manner.

I thought Stuart Hogg did really well when he came on. Yes, he’s my team-mate at Glasgow Warriors so I might be biased, but he plays the game with confidence and skill and you would never think that he is only 19 years of age. I don’t necessarily think he’s a player for the future, I think he’s a player for now and he probably proved that at the weekend.

We’ve been able to train in our own time over the past few days, and the guys who have families have been able to spend time with them – that has been particularly appreciated by those who spent a lot of time away at the World Cup.

The team to face France at Murrayfield on Sunday will be announced early this week, and I just hope to be included in the squad and hopefully make the starting line-up. In next week’s Scotland on Sunday I will be looking ahead to that match, when we must use the disappointment of the first two games as a stimulus to make an impact in the last three.