Gregor Townsend felt Scotland produced one of their best performances of recent years as they threatened an upset against world champions South Africa before succumbing to a 32-15 defeat at Murrayfield.

The Scots were 19-9 down at the break following two tries from Makazole Mapimpi and one from Thomas du Toit after Scott Cummings was shown a 20-minute red card for a dangerous clear-out of a ruck.

But they rallied impressively after the break and got back to within four points at a time when the Boks were down to 14 men following a yellow card for Mapimpi just before the hour.

Scotland’s failure to add a try to Finn Russell’s five penalties proved costly, however, as South Africa pulled away in the closing stages, with a late try from Jasper Wiese putting gloss on the scoreline.

“I thought it was one of our best performances of the last few seasons,” said Townsend, who felt Cummings’ red was “very harsh”.

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“A performance like that, to go up against the world champions, you’ve got to bring your own physicality and match their physicality.

“You’ve got to work as hard as you’ve ever worked and I felt our players did that. When you consider that we were down a man for 20 minutes, and that player being a second row, it takes a huge effort to get through that. And the effort was there in the second half.

“When the game was opening up, we looked at times the fitter team and it looked like we were sharper. So there’s a huge amount of pride, not just pride, but pleasing aspects of the performance.

“There was some skill execution that we have to improve, but I also felt we had a bit of bad luck. We stole a lineout in our 22 and the ball bobbles into their hands (for Du Toit) and they score seven points when they hadn’t had much pressure.

“The question about not scoring tries, that’s a valid one, but I felt we had enough pressure and positions to score more points so we’ll look at how we can improve that.”

Captain Sione Tuipulotu felt there was a “vibe” about Scotland’s play in the second half as they threatened to get their noses in front going into the final quarter.

“We put ourselves in positions to score tries,” he said. “I thought the last bit of execution really let us down, especially in the finish zone, close to the line.

“We were down there for a big part of that second half and we didn’t walk away with tries that we should have, so we’ve got to take responsibility for that. The game was there to be won and we didn’t execute.”

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South Africa defeated Scotland 18-3 at the World Cup in Marseille 14 months ago and their head coach Rassie Erasmus was pleased to restrict them to no tries once more, even though he conceded his side were fortunate to win by 17 points.

“I know the scoreboard maybe doesn’t tell the whole story,” he said.

“But probably we can be very proud of playing against Finn Russell in two games and not giving a try away. I think that’s really hard to do, but it’s certainly not a performance we’re very proud of.”