GREIG Laidlaw finally watched Scotland’s Rugby World Cup quarter-final defeat by Australia earlier this week - and the national captain is confident that match can inspire his team in this year’s RBS Six Nations Championship.

The game against the Wallabies back in October was a heartbreaker for the underdogs, who led by two points inside the last couple of minutes. Then a mistake by referee Craig Joubert gave the Australians the penalty from which they won the match 35-34 - and the South African official rubbed salt into Scottish wounds by running off the park right after blowing the final whistle.

Laidlaw knows the injustice he felt at the end of the game will never really go away. But he is sure that Scotland can take heart from how well they played then - and go out and prove against England on Saturday that it was not a one-off.

“I watched the Australia game last night in full for the first time,” Laidlaw said yesterday after training at BT Murrayfield. “I got excited watching it.

“I was able to take the emotion away from it. We played some good rugby. It was a great feeling watching some of it.

“The anger will never disappear. It will come and go. Used in the right way it can help. I was simply watching it as a game of rugby last night and we played well - but we could have played even better.

“We were extremely close to making the semi-final. We have to take the good feelings from that game and learn why we fell short. If we can do that, we’ll be in a good place with our preparations.

“We’re trying to get that no-excuse mentality. It’s being drummed into the squad and I believe we’re getting there.”

As well as reminding himself of how well Scotland played for a lot of that game, Laidlaw decided it was just as important to look at the things that went wrong - and work out how to make sure they do not happen again in the Calcutta Cup match. “We need to understand why we were beaten. It was good to learn from it.

“There were opportunities within the game that we missed, so we need to have our finger on the pulse come Saturday throughout the 80 minutes. We lost concentration on a couple of occasions during the game. We need to concentrate for as long as the game lasts.

“It’s all of these little things which add up. We we were only just beaten and we could just as easily won. We played with a lot of skill and put Australia under a lot of pressure.”

Three and a half months on from that match at Twickenham, Laidlaw is desperate to find the same form his team showed then, and ensure that this year they do themselves justice in the Six Nations. The fact that the last time England came north they won 20-0 will only strengthen the scrum-half’s desire to make amends this time round.

“We have to turn Murrayfield into a difficult place for teams to come and play us,” he added. “We have to move on from the World Cup.

“We’ve under-performed in the past Six Nations, and nobody’s going to give us a helping hand apart from ourselves. We need to grab the opportunity, but it’s a tough task ahead.”