According to the old adage pride comes before a fall, but increasingly Scotland’s players and coaches are reverting to bad old ways in declaring how pleased they are with themselves after they have been brought down.

Self-satisfaction exuded from within the camp with repeated proclamations of how proud they were of their efforts following Saturday’s 11th successive loss to a team coached by Warren Gatland, whose Wales are within a game of giving him a record to justifiably boast about, by becoming the first coach ever to oversee three Grand Slam triumphs.

What makes that all the more impressive is that Gatland’s teams have not played particularly well in this championship. They have, for the most part, simply found ways to win, the mark of the truly competitive.

That has, in turn, allowed the man who has largely overlooked Scottish players on the two British & Irish Lions tours he has coached, to talk of having developed a group of serial winners observing afterwards that: "We've spoken about forgetting how to lose and these guys are finding ways to win.”

There was a time when Scotland’s players could claim something similar albeit, as captain Stuart McInally pointed out before the game when speaking of the grand tradition they are upholding which dates back to the days before he and most of his colleagues were born, as demonstrated by his inability to cite an example more recent than the Grand Slam win of 1990.

That was Scotland’s second clean sweep in six years, a golden spell during which those successes which sandwiched another title win in 1986, the year current squad member Adam Hastings’ father and uncle were introduced to the side and an era in which one of their colleagues - British & Irish Lions captain Finlay Calder if memory serves - observed that anyone can be selected for Scotland, what matters is winning for Scotland.

By contrast, in these professional days that have now generated a record sequence of championships without a Scottish triumph, we have heard coach after coach claim that it is all about performance and that winning is merely a by-product. In a sport that is meant to be all about retention of possession and territorial domination, Saturday’s second half once again put the lie to that as Scotland had 75 per cent of both, yet managed just a single score, Darcy Graham’s well taken try, before Wales stand off Gareth Anscombe rounded off their 18-11 win with the last kick of the ball.

On this occasion, just as in Paris a fortnight earlier, Scotland could, too, have been so far behind at half-time that the period after the interval was irrelevant.

This time there were mitigating factors in the latest chopping and changing required by a group that somehow seems much more injury prone than its contemporaries, Scotland running out of back-row and back three players by the second quarter of the match, during which they conceded the tries to Josh Adams and Jonathan Davies that helped Wales into a deserved 15-6 lead.

These were the first tries a far from prolific Wales have scored before the break in this championship, but were finished with an ease that, as would be demonstrated after the break, stands in stark contrast to Scotland’s capacity to finish when in what is often referred to as ‘the red zone.’

Gregor Townsend was to complain afterwards about the fact that their opponents played the whole game with 15 men on the field, but the scale of transgressions was probably fairly reflected in a penalty count of 11 against the visitors to Scotland’s eight, reflecting remarkable Welsh discipline in the face of the pressure to which they were subjected.

Scotland’s head coach ought to be much more concerned about an incapacity to turn pressure into points that is reminiscent of his time as attack coach when the team would huff and puff endlessly in the opposition 22 without getting rewarded. That period bizarrely ended, in 2012, with the sacking of defence coach Graham Steadman after four successive matches in which Scotland had failed to score a try, just 27 having been registered in 34 matches over the previous three years.

The real scale of Scottish championship failure, though, must be seen in the context of this being a sport which reflects an old-fashioned British view of the world, with the Home Unions retaining four of the 10 protected places in rugby’s elite and three of the other six held by members of the Commonwealth.

Where Wales, Ireland and, to a lesser extent England (given their vast playing resources) have made use of that advantaged position in occupying three of the top four places in what are rather ludicrously referred to as ‘world rankings’, Scotland’s heady sequence of successive third place championship finishes has ended, while they are back to fighting with fellow under-achievers France and poor relations Argentina for a place in the top eight.

Over these past two decades the only real achievement at Murrayfield has been in the successful process of lowering expectations of the Scottish rugby public, which lets marketeers routinely send players out with well-rehearsed messages about the joy of getting to play in front of ‘sell-out crowds’.

There were, of course, aspects of Saturday’s game that were commendable, most notably the efforts of the lively Graham on his try-scoring home debut; that of Hamish Watson when the flanker came off the bench in the second half and proved almost untackleable as he unleashed two months of frustration; and perhaps best of all the way young Hastings adapted to the full-back role at which his father excelled, but in which he has never been employed as a professional.

To dominate a Grand Slam pursuing Wales in that second half as they did might also have encouraged more observers to offer them considerable credit, but it would be much easier to do so if they were not so ready to claim it for themselves, having lost for Scotland yet again.