What may have been a long overdue turning point for Scottish rugby was, last weekend, spoiled by emotional and emotive outbursts before, during and after the World Cup quarter-final exit.

The way Scots seemed to celebrate having unexpectedly earned the chance to feel sorry for themselves while Australians were flaying themselves for having performed so poorly in winning a World Cup quarter-final, would have been bad enough.

However there was something particularly distasteful about the prejudicial edge to references to the citing commissioner who had flagged up the previous week’s offences of Ross Ford and Jonny Gray being Australian and the referee who gave Australia their decisive penalty being from the Southern Hemisphere.

When I was invited onto a radio programme the following day to discuss how people involved in sport can fail to adhere to its conventions when under pressure, the focus was upon the behaviour of referee Craig Joubert because he ran down the tunnel without shaking players’ hands.

Yet what about the thousands upon thousands who filled Twickenham with a crescendo of boos as Bernard Foley lined up, then kicked that far from straightforward winning penalty?

I wonder what our erstwhile Herald colleague Bill McLaren would have had to say about that, given the pride he always took in the respect rugby audiences conventionally offered goal-kickers. Had they succeeded in putting Foley off I wonder, too, how much attention we might have paid to the audience contribution to Scotland claiming a first competitive win in seven attempts against ‘Tier One’ nations this year.

As much as they deserved to be in with a chance and were decidedly more creative than when producing elements-assisted victories over these same Wallabies in two of their previous three meetings, it is going much too far to suggest that a team with that record in big matches was somehow entitled to feel robbed in overall terms when the try count, generally an indicator of the balance of play, was 5-3 in their opponents’ favour.

Vern Cotter, Scotland’s head coach and his players, in the way they competed and, for the most part, their unwillingness to attribute their defeat to the referee - in spite of being repeatedly invited to do so by journalists who are pretty much obliged to pursue, or at least report the populist lines – at last went some way towards regaining some self-respect.

However, as one goading commentator with a preference for the more popular football code, was swift to point out on Twitter, rugby’s self-regarding view of itself was done no favours by, in particular, the whingeing of former Scotland players whose attacks on the referee have been crass.

“Rugby's holier than thou arrogance has always been an offensive cover-up,” Ewan Murray, The Guardian’s golf correspondent, suggested.

“At least the shocking treatment of Sunday's referee exposes that.”

Ewan’s a funny bloke who enjoys a wind-up and after a brief exchange he seemed to accept my point that, struggling as it is on most fronts – with the glorious exception of the Murray boys - Scotland is ill-served by the sneering of sports towards one another, but that by no means invalidates his point.

That said, how much better to respond in the manner of one lady from the Borders, who sends me the occasional email about rugby, but whose preference for anonymity speaks to a dignified reserve from which others would do well to learn.

In a manner befitting the oral tradition of storytelling which inspired that area’s wondrous writer, James Hogg ‘the Ettrick Shepherd’, she remembers her late father, who refereed school first XV matches, telling her a tale relayed to him by the late Bob Burrell, a great international player of yesteryear. He in turn had heard it told against himself by the late Jock Wemyss, another international player who preceded Bill McLaren in entering the broadcast booth to become ‘the voice of rugby’ of his era.

“As they say there are no ‘ifs’ in history,” she wrote.

“I loved the story attributed to the late Jock Wemyss when discussing playing for Scotland against Wales in 1922, I think.

“’We were camped on the Welsh line and it was our put in (he had told an acquaintance). The ball went against the head and play was taken quickly, by the Welsh, to the other end of the pitch. But who was it who got back in time to prevent a try, me (Jock) not the speedy backs.’’

“’His listener then replied ‘You would have saved yourself a hell of a lot of bother if you had hooked the ball in the first place!!’”

My correspondent concluded with observations of her own that help restore perspective and were very much in keeping with the way Jock Wemyss was chastened.

“Scotland would have done likewise if the ball was secured at the line out (on Sunday),” she wrote.

“I look forward to the rest of the rugby season.”

As she does so here’s hoping, too, that administrators play their part in creating an improved environment for the national squad to work in by learning from their mistakes and setting realistic strategic goals.

Those should include improving upon this year’s Six Nations ‘whitewash’ as a first step in building towards the 2019 World Cup and bidding to earn the right to be considered likely rather than shock contenders for a semi-final place.