THE last time Scotland played in Wales, they suffered their worst humiliation in the Six Nations Championship since it began at the turn of the century. Indeed, that 51-3 defeat two years ago was arguably their worst result of the professional era.

In terms of simple arithmetic it was not as bad as the 68-10 loss to South Africa at Murrayfield in 1997, or the 69-20 defeat by New Zealand three years later. But in the circumstances it was an even blacker afternoon.

The Springboks were world champions when they toured 19 years ago, and the All Blacks, then as now, were one of the best teams on the planet. Wales, by contrast, were only the third best team in the Six Nations that year.

What made it worse for Scotland was that, after losing their first home game 20-0 to England, they had gone on to win in Rome by a single point then lost by only two to France at Murrayfield. It looked as if they had turned the corner, but then what could go wrong did go wrong in Cardiff, in what was their last Test under interim head coach Scott Johnson. Stuart Hogg’s sending-off midway through the first half clearly contributed to the scale of the defeat, but in no way excused it or explained it away.

For Matt Scott, among others who represented Scotland that afternoon, the memory of that match remains painful. “That was personally the worst I’ve ever felt after a game,” said the Edinburgh centre, who is again in the team to play against Wales on Saturday.

“We hadn’t scored a point against England and then went to Wales and were beaten by 50 points. Just horrendous. Still sticks in the memory.”

Something else that sticks in Scott’s memory - as it should do, given the number of times it has happened - is the patronising reaction that he and his team-mates receive when they have lost a game after showing a bit more spirit than they were able to muster in that 2014 game. “Coming up short time and again, we’re sick of going to after match functions and hearing condescending comments,” he said. “‘Oh you played well - better luck next time’. There’s a sense that we should just put that to bed.”

They were unable to do so against England last week, losing 15-9 in their opening Championship match of the year. The result and the performance were distinctly better than that 20-0 loss two years ago, but it was nonetheless a severe disappointment after the optimism generated by last year’s Rugby World Cup. It was also an eighth consecutive Six Nations defeat - another unwanted record.

“The boys are working extremely hard on and off the pitch to change these results,” Scott insisted. “Nobody wants to go out there wanting to make mistakes or drop balls. There’s no magic cure: it’s cutting your own individual error count.

“This has been the toughest pre-Six Nations in terms of physical and mental training I’ve had in my five or six times. You’re working hard anyway, and we were a bit flat at the weekend and now there’s no excuses from us.

“We’re due ourselves a performance and the supporters a performance. We just have to focus and make sure we’re doing our jobs properly.”

It has become a commonplace now for players to react to a defeat by declaring that the key to improvement is to go back to the training pitch and work even harder than they have been doing. But as Scott said, this Scotland squad is already working harder than it has done for the previous half-dozen years. Little surprise, then, that Vern Cotter, the head coach, is emphasising working more intelligently rather than simply increasing an already heavy work load.

“It’s making sure we’re not training for the sake of training,” Scott explained. “Vern talks about learning from our mistakes a lot.

“A year ago we were up against England at half-time at Twickenham, and then we just took our foot off the pedal. He compared that to the last five minutes of the weekend when we were still within a score of England and we had a couple of lineouts outside the 22 we didn’t win, then they had the ball in possession and we just weren’t hungry enough to get the ball back.

“He showed us clips of Six Nations [matches] last year when again we were within a score and we didn’t seem to want to get the ball back. We just weren’t aggressive enough in our defence and clinical enough when we had the ball.

“He’s saying ‘What are we learning here?’ That’s the big thing, are we learning from our mistakes? And that’s the biggest disappointment of the weekend: we aren’t learning from games in the past when we were in the lead or close to it and we couldn’t quite get over the line. That’s the mental side of it, and it’s also analysing what we do at training.”

Whatever failings the squad may still have on that mental side of the game, it is hard to see them losing on Saturday by anything like the margin they did two years ago. And yet the reality is that they could improve on their performance against England yet still lose to Wales, whose draw against Ireland on Sunday was of a higher order of rugby than anything on show in the Calcutta Cup a day earlier.