Gregor Townsend had every reason to feel buoyant after Saturday night’s 30-27 loss against a strong France team in their penultimate World Cup warm-up match at a raucous Stade Geoffroy-Guichard in Saint Etienne.

After all, his boys had played some scintillating attacking rugby, they fronted up physically against one of the most formidable sides on the planet, they showed bags of resilience, several key players produced statement performances of the sort that will be required against South Africa in four weekends’ time, and – crucially – there was no new injury or disciplinary concerns to confuse his thought process as he finalises his 33-strong squad for the World Cup today and tomorrow (ahead of Wednesday morning’s official announcement).

“The team has trained so well, and I can't believe we are frustrated at not producing a win over in France, but we are – partly because of how we started and partly because of how we are training,” said the coach on Saturday night. 

“I have never seen a squad train as well. Their fitness is great but that is not even in the top two or three elements. It is the rugby, the decision-making, the toughness physically and the cohesion that has impressed us.

“We don’t always get a huge amount of time together during the regular season, but we have been able to grow our attacking game this summer and we are seeing these performances come. 

“I would love three or four more warm-up games, so we get more opportunity to play together although I understand the more games you play the more chance there is of things going wrong injury-wise.”

“But I do see the team grow the more we play together, and we have to be close to our best for that South Africa game on the opening weekend of the World Cup.”

READ MORE: Gregor Townsend insists Scotland are a match for anyone

While there certainly was a lot to like about the performance, the bottom line is that this is a game Scotland could have won, and they didn’t manage it. They do, of course, deserve credit for getting themselves into a position to claim a major scalp, but there was a desperate sense of inevitability about that attacking line-out in the final minute which France managed to snaffle. We’ve seen this movie before – many times over.

The nagging suspicion remains that Townsend’s side still haven’t mastered of the art of consistently executing core skills when the real pressure is on, and they have a tendency to fall out of games for costly periods which allow the opposition to get away from them on the scoreboard (as happened in the five minutes directly after half-time on Saturday when France ran in two fairly soft tries).

It is perhaps an unfair comparison, but Ireland – one of the sides Scotland will face in the pool stage of the World Cup – demonstrated what a team which expects to win no matter what looks like when they played Scotland at Murrayfield in the Six Nations this year.

The visitors lost three forwards in the first half of that match, then half-time but Ireland didn’t miss a beat. They drove forward with flanker Josh van der Flier chucking in at the line-out (only one line-out was lost) and prop Cian Healy packing down in the middle of the front-row. Even after losing centre Garry Ringrose with a brain injury with 10 minutes to go, the plan did not deviate, and the men in green ended up comprehensive 22-7 winners.

No hard luck stories, no drawing comfort from lessons learned – losing was never an option.

It feels like Scotland are closer than they ever have been to that sort of mind-set but are they there yet? On this evidence the answer is: no.

Those who remember the 2019 World Cup will inevitably feel some anxiety about the optimistic vibes emanating from the squad, because it is very similar to the mood four years ago until Ireland blew Townsend’s team away in the opening match. They never recovered from that and ended up being jettisoned out of the tournament at the end of the pool stage after losing their final pool match to hosts, Japan.

Townsend’s view is that this painful memory can benefit the Scots this time round.

“When we come to the tournament, we‘ve got to realise that it is just another game, like we did tonight,” he reasoned. “Playing in that atmosphere in the stadium, against the team we were up against, we realised that we’ve got to focus on ourselves.

“Emotionally, we didn't get it right for the Ireland game [in 2019] and a lot of that was down to me. 

“So, that will be a lesson learned – that we have to keep focussed and keep calm and bring our best game, and the score-line will take care of itself.

“We’re fit enough, we’ve got the game and we’ve got the players to take on any team we come up against. Today was great preparation for what is likely to happen in the World Cup with noisy atmospheres and against powerful forwards – and our players thrived in that environment.”