Scotland believe they are closing the gap to the world’s top sides despite Sunday’s defeat by South Africa, according to forwards coach John Dalziel.
The Scots produced a battling display against the world champions at Murrayfield but were ultimately outscored by four tries to nil as the Springboks pulled away late on for a 32-15 victory.
“I think we’re on the right path,” Dalziel said as his side prepare to host Portugal on Saturday. “If you look at even the growth from the World Cup [18-3 defeat by South Africa], I think we were arguably out of that game in periods. We were second fiddle the whole game.
“I think we’ve taken a lot of learnings from that period, learnings from the Six Nations. We’ve grown the group, we’re evolving the whole time. We feel we are getting closer.
“We have all the components. We just need to find a way of, once we’ve worked for 60 minutes, to keep ourselves in there, we need to find a way of getting over that last hurdle.
“If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. I definitely feel in the last few Tests we’ve fronted up and we’re sure we can be competitive away from home or at home against the top teams.”
After facing Portugal, Scotland round off their Autumn Nations Series against an Australia side who stunned England at Twickenham last time out.
Dalziel wants his team to emerge from the campaign with three wins from four and says that, while there will be changes to the team for the match against Portugal, there will be no complacency against the team ranked 15th in the world.
“We’ve got to pay ultimate respect to Portugal,” Dalziel said. “They’re coming to play against a Six Nations side away from home for the first time, 55,000 people at Murrayfield.
“They’ve got a game that can rival anybody, we’ve seen that at the World Cup. Their defeat against Fiji, they were very competitive.
“They should have done better against Wales where they had opportunities to win that game. We’ll give them the full respect.
“There will be a couple of players I’d imagine freshening up, but we’ll pick a strong Test team to win this weekend. We want to finish with three wins.”
