There is always a swagger about Danny Brough, but when he gets the chance to put on a kilt it becomes a peacockiness and the little Yorkshire tyke who leads the Scotland rugby league team felt he and his colleagues earned their plaudits that were coming their way after their first ever meeting with England in Coventry on Saturday.

As in every one of their encounters in this Rugby League Four Nations, the under-resourced and under-prepared fourth team that is making up the numbers in a competition owned by and designed to showcase the talents of the other three, had no chance of generating an upset. However they not only claimed the lead through Kane Linnett’s early try to ‘win’ the first quarter 4-0, but doubled their advantage 25 minutes into the game courtesy of Matty Russell producing one of the most brilliant pieces of finishing the sport has ever seen and they remained ahead until four minutes from the interval.

While Brough took some pleasure from the position Scotland found themselves in at that stage it was typically of the demands the captain makes of himself and those around him that he was more disappointed at his own failure to secure the full reward for that try and the one which preceded it.

“I was fuming with myself that I missed the two kicks to be honest, but it was a nice feeling and I thought we were creating good opportunities,” he observed.

The match had already swung England’s way by the mid-point of the second half when Brough’s sin-binning for slowing things down in the tackle after a rare England line break allowed them to ease clear and the standards he expects by all concerned in terms of consistency of performance were also reflected in his assessment of that decision.

“I thought it was the same scenario in the first half when I was held down by (Jonny) Lomax and I didn’t even get a penalty,” he said of the way he had held onto.

“I did the same thing and got sin-binned, so it’s different rules for different people when it comes to that.”

He was by no means the first captain of an underdog team in an international match to feel that there was an element of the officials looking more at their team than those they expected to dominate and, albeit clearly in the context of understanding that tendency, suggested that had been a problem throughout.

“I did feel we lost a lot of 50/50s but that’s part and parcel of the game. The last two minutes were diabolical. I thought he could have just blown up, but that’s up to him,” he said, referring to the unusual succession of post-buzzer decisions that eventually ended with Liam Farrell registering the seventh of England’s tries to round off a 38-12 win that is unlikely to be sufficient to see them into the tournament final.

On a night when many observers were surprised by the level of emotion shown by the Scotland captain who, just three years ago, was a bewilderingly controversial omission from England’s World Cup squad when he was acknowledged to be the most influential player in the domestic game at that time, Brough’s focus was, however, on his team and the way they had improved both defensively and from the 54-12 beating by Australia’s world champion Kangaroos eight days earlier.

“It was a pretty pleasing first half,” he reckoned.

“I thought the lads rose to the occasion and we really had a dig. We let ourselves down in the second half but it was a big improvement on last week’s game so there’s a lot to take out of it.”

“Last week we were disappointed. We felt we let ourselves down and were a bit rabbit in headlights in the first half an hour, but second half we caused a few problems. When you’re underdogs you need to be a bit more scrappy, a bit more hands in ruck and cause a bit of trouble and when we do that we seem to be in the game a lot more.”

He agreed with the view of England’s deeply disgruntled Australian coach Wayne Bennett that the home team had been complacent going into the match, but even so believes they will be unable to claim the victory they will need against the Kangaroos to reach the final.

“England are a bit more physical, but Australia play very smart, very basic and don’t make many errors, where I thought England made far too many errors to be a team to beat Australia next week,” was his assessment.

The scale of England’s task as they seek to get through on points differential will meanwhile depend on how Scotland perform the previous night in Workington against the Kiwis who were beaten 14-8 by their fellow antipodeans in the second match of Saturday’s double-header, but there was something refreshingly old-fashioned about Brough’s relish at the prospect of another meeting with the team that ended their shock run at the 2013 World Cup in the quarter-finals on a night that will see him match Scotland’s cap record.

“It will be a massive task… have you seen the size of them?” he asked rhetorically, with a wry grin.

“They might rest a few, hopefully they do, but we’re underdogs again, nobody expects us to do ‘owt. We just like being together, having a few bevvies and going out and playing.”