Scotland head coach Scott Johnson was left demanding improvements from his side despite watching them seal third place in their quadrangular tournament with a narrow victory over Italy in South Africa.
A disappointing defeat to Samoa was followed up by a gutsy loss to South Africa and although Scotland, who finished third in this year’s RBS 6 Nations, finally got a win under their belts, downing the Azzurri 30-29, Johnson was far from impressed.
Scotland needed a last-minute try from Alasdair Strokosch to seal the victory but Johnson believes the performance was under-par.
“I’ll take the win but acknowledge that we need to do a damn sight better,” he said.
“If you take the scoreboard away, there’s a lot of things we didn’t do well. Our performance wasn’t good.
“A win is far better than a loss but there are areas that we are trying to take pride in that need to improve.
“We can’t shy away from that because the scoreboard favoured us.
“Last week we were simply outstanding and should have got a win but here we were poor.
“On the bright side, they showed great resolve and great character.
“This is a hurt team. We were playing wounded there, we’ve really gone to the depths of our player base.”
