Well, let's be honest. We like to think we are a top-level rugby playing country, but it looks as if that one result, a hammering by Fiji, proves we aren't really.

I met David Williams, of the Hawks, on the train from Edinburgh. ''Guess what the score was against Fiji?'' I asked.

''A comfortable win?'' he replied.

I had to tell him the truth, the awful truth. And that's the core of the problem: with huge expectation hanging around the Scotland rugby team's shoulders, the side has tumbled, in one season, to record defeats by Australia, South Africa, France, England, and now becomes the first Five Nations side to lose to Fiji. Ever.

Now, I played in a side beaten by Romania, in Romania, in the heat. It was awful. The score was 28-22, and they scored one try more than us. It was a national disaster. But it wasn't as big a disaster as this one. This was seven tries to two.

Let's take a look at football to compare. Football, post Second World War, saw the explosion of its game worldwide, and Scotland, after fielding what were second XIs against the minor teams, soon found themselves overtaken.

The general public, and the footballing public in particular, nowadays usually think the team is going to be beaten by all but the worst.

A draw with Columbia is viewed as a national triumph on a par with Bannockburn. Craig Brown has taught the Scottish public to expect not a lot, so that when something comes along we leap and bound and kiss each other.

But folk still expect the Scottish rugby team to win most of their games. Or did. In 1991 we were, officially, after a play-off with the All Blacks at Cardiff in the World Cup, ranked fourth in the world. How we have slipped.

As I say, I was on the train yesterday, and it goes right past Murrayfield. All that money ploughed into that steel and concrete needs the Scottish team to win to pay for it. To get bums on seats. People will have been shocked at that result, and they have a right to be. The whole of our domestic set-up has been changed, using Super Teams to supposedly give us a better chance of winning at international level.

Fiji, with a population of 784,000, produces bigger, stronger, and faster people than Scotland. I suspect that Fiji have become much better at XV-a-side rugby. But the plain truth is that we are getting steadily worse.

Maybe it's about time we adopted football's air of realism, so that a win against Latvia can be seen as a tremendous success.