As Milton Haig, Georgia’s coach, dealt with questions he is fed up answering but know he has to in order to keep reinforcing vital points, comparison with the first visit to Scotland of the team they had faced the previous weekend came to mind.

Back then, seeking admission to the old pals club that was the International Rugby Board cabal of founder nations, Argentina suffered a similar sort of margin of defeat on their first Test visit to Scotland, a 49-3 mauling at the hands of what was then Europe’s best side, that year’s Grand Slam winners who had gone to New Zealand and very nearly beaten the All Blacks not once but twice that summer.

It was a last hurrah for their equivalent of Georgian captain Mamuka Gorgodze, the great Hugo Porta who, it is shocking to realise, has just reached bus pass age but was already in his 40th year when he played his last international match at Murrayfield that day, having done more than any other individual to elevate his nation’s rugby profile.

In those terms the talismanic Gorgodze has rather more in the way of support from men playing at the highest level in the sport in this very different era, but the issues that force Haig to go round and round in circles are the same. It is all very well having the right quality of players but if they do not get sufficient exposure to the right level of competition their progress will be retarded.

In those terms another valid comparison is with the Scotland rugby league team and their recent Four Nations campaign in which they met the three strongest national teams in the world on successive weekends, Australia, England and New Zealand.

In the first of those matches a Scotland team that looked highly competitive on paper was blown away in the opening half hour of their meeting with the world champion Kangaroos, adjusted to the pace of the game from that point, to the extent that there was a 42 minute playing period, more than half a match, in which they out-scored their opponents.

The following weekend they came out stronger against an England team that was stunned by Scottish intensity and inventiveness, to the extent that they trailed until six minutes before the interval and, for all that they were by then being held together by glue and sellotape while loaded with pain-killers, the Scots then ended their campaign by claiming a draw with world number one side New Zealand.

As Haig pointed out on Saturday, Georgia have been given just three opportunities in total - outside World Cups when opponents have no say in the matter - to face top teams since they rocked Ireland a decade ago at the 2007 global gathering in France.

On Saturday, then, we saw the equivalent of Scotland v the Kangaroos as - setting aside a magical moment for Vasil Lobzhanidze, their little livewire of a scrum-half whose awareness and alertness saw him become the first player ever to score a try in Tests between these sides in the fifth minute – the men from the Caucasus were unable to cope with the forward organisation and running lines of opponents who had spent the previous weekends playing against two of last year’s World Cup semi-finalists.

All of Scotland’s back three had their names on the scoresheet by the interval, while the forwards had earned a penalty try, but once they worked out what was required Georgia, as Danny Brough and his boys had done in Hull a few weeks earlier, then showed that once exposed to what was required they could respond and they served proper notice of their true potential.

A second try for Lobzhadnidze, who only last year became the youngest man ever to play in a World Cup tournament, was the minimum reward they deserved for long periods of dominance during the second half and we can only wonder just what they might be capable of if they were given a comparable schedule to that of either of the Scotland rugby teams that have been in action this autumn.

Haig was right, then, when acknowledging that it was rather easier for his men to perform as they did once the competitive pressure had been reduced by having no chance of winning the game.

“We were certainly disappointed with our forwards in the first half and just really decided that we needed to show what we could do. We had nothing to lose by then so was a case of putting bodies on the line and going out and playing like Georgia does,” he said.

However as harsh as that critique of his own side’s efforts may have been Haig knew that, as bored as he clearly is with the required repetition, he must not miss the opportunity to draw the attention of what is an obvious lesson for those responsible for the development of international rugby.

“The difficult thing for us as a Tier Two nation is that we’ve come from (playing) Japan and Samoa, while they’ve come from Australa and Argentina. There’s a big gap between the styles and pace of the game and I think that’s what showed today,” he said.

“That first half you could definitely see there was a big gap between where we’d come from and where they’d come from and we struggled to keep pace with that.”

As a footnote it is worth noting that Argentina began to get more regular exposure to Tier One rugby in the nineties.

Following that Murrayfield thrashing it took 18 years and eight more meetings before Scotland beat them again.