Kieran Crowley says Italy have positives to take from performance against Scotland

Italy head coach Kieran Crowley believes his team can take “a lot of positives” from their performance against Scotland despite going down 25-13 at Scottish Gas Murrayfield.

Scotland's Josh Bayliss scores the third and final try of the match against Italy.

In the Azzurri’s first match since March – which was against Scotland, in Edinburgh, and resulted in another 12-point deficit (26-14) – a Montanna Ioane try and eight points from the boot of ex-Scotland youth cap Tomasso Allan kept the visitors competitive before Josh Bayliss’ late try finally took the game away from them.

"There are a lot of positives we can take out of that,” said Crowley. “It was exactly the same as March [26-14 in Six Nations]. Later in the game a couple of our set-plays went awry. We didn't execute them as well as we could have done and gave the ball to Scotland. They got the momentum, so good on them.

"But we stuck at it. We showed a lot of fight and some of our play were reasonable. We just caught a little bit late in our chuck tackles, they held us up and slowed our ball down, which didn't allow us to get going as we would have liked. It was the first game in 12 weeks for some of them so we will take the positives, look at the other things and move forward.”

Italy now move on to Dublin, where they take on the Irish next weekend at the Aviva Stadium as they continue their World Cup preparations. Crowley’s men are in Group A alongside hosts France, New Zealand, Uruguay and Namibia in the tournament.