Finn Russell sat slumped on the Twickenham turf, replaying those final, crucial, excruciating moments in his head. There is perhaps nothing as isolating in rugby, described this week by England captain Maro Itoje as the ultimate team game, as a kick at goal; stood alone a few metres from the tee, a great amphitheatre falling silent as one lines up a strike, the match hinging on your putting of boot to ball.
Amid the gnawing of fingernails, Russell looked confident. Duhan van der Merwe veer towards the corner as he stormed in a scintillating Scottish score had made the conversion tough, but the fly half has an outstanding kicking record at international level. Bath teammate and England prop Will Stuart admitted afterwards that he fully expected his club colleague to land the conversion; England were already planning a restart that would give them an opportunity to snatch a win slipping from their grasp.
A growing lover of golf, Russell’s drive was the kind that a welcoming fairway would gobble up, straight enough and true enough in most other circumstances. But like the toughest major courses, the margins are mighty fine in Test rugby – a pull to the left by a couple of yards, his third miss of the evening, proved the difference between despair and a cacophonous Scottish Calcutta Cup climax.
“It's obviously a tough result to take in the end,” co-captain Rory Darge said afterwards. “When a game is as close as that, and you obviously put in so much effort throughout the week, and then to come out on the wrong side of the result, we're gutted.
“But I think the performance was so much better and that's what led to us having an opportunity to win the game."
The consolatory gestures came quickly as the travelling squad got around their fly half. Van der Merwe pat on the head provided solace; so too the encouraging words of his squadmates. Once most of the England players had dispersed, scrum half Ben Spencer found his Bath half-back partner, a captain consoling a friend turned foe – he and Russell had shared a similarly sore embrace here at Twickenham after their Premiership final defeat to Northampton in June.
For it is becoming an unfortunate theme of the great orchestrator’s career to come so close and yet feel so far from tangible triumph. Ahead of this Six Nations, Russell candidly admitted to The Independent that he felt he had not won nearly enough in his career; one Pro14 winners’ medal with Glasgow all that adorns the mantlepiece. He could, at least, look at regular Calcutta Cup hoistings as a mark of Scotland’s progress – after a game they could or should have won, the 32-year-old has not even that.
The cruel realities of sport mean that no-one will remember in the passage of time just how well Scotland played at Twickenham, just how much control Russell managed to exert. The visitors dominated territory and possession, allying some gorgeous attacking architecture to a contestable kick game that worked for large stretches.
England’s players conceded afterwards that they had been caught off-guard by a considered, creative gameplan from their visitors. Test teams that win the try tally three to one seldom lose; Test teams that carry for 459 metres more than their opponents come out on the wrong side of the ledger even more rarely.
But Scotland did. Asked afterwards about the positives he would take from the defeat, head coach Gregor Townsend had to take time to consider how best to phrase his answer, knowing that the defeat meant that he could not overly praise a performance arguably better than some of those that have proved sufficient to win this fixture over the last four years.
"I'm so proud of the group for that effort," Townsend eventually said. "It probably surpasses, performance-wise, what we've done the last two or three years. A lot went right. We scored three tries to one.
“Normally when you have that amount of pressure on occasions to score points, you get more on the board, so that’s a work on. They did all they could to retain the cup, but it was probably down to England’s defence and also them kicking their penalties when they got them in the second half.”
The cruel pangs of defeat will course through battered bodies on Sunday but cooling heads will recognise the wider meaning of a second consecutive defeat. This was a vast improvement on their Ireland no-show and yet they are now out of the Six Nations title reckoning – again. Eight years after Townsend’s arrival, there has still been no true championship challenge mustered. Might things have been different in this campaign had Sione Tuipulotu and Scott Cummings been available? The last couple of years suggest not.
But perhaps this is where Scotland are: good but not good enough, capable of stirring, stimulating highs but never quite consistent enough to seize the brass ring. Could a new coach raise the ceiling of this group? Townsend’s tremendous transformation should not be understated but the questions will naturally continue to come.
For it is all too easy to paint the portrait of valiant-but-not-quite-victorious Scots; dashing, daring, but disappointed. Their Calcutta Cup supremacy did not deserve to end but as Russell and the rest of the clan haul themselves up off the canvas and try to go again, there will be plenty to agonise over.
