Scotland’s defence coach Matt Taylor took it personally as he watched the national team concede five tries to the world’s 16th ranked side on Saturday but he believes that performance will enhance their mindset ahead of this weekend’s visit of the All Blacks.

The former Glasgow Warriors assistant coach reckoned the opposition deserved considerable credit for embarrassing his men in getting within a score of creating a major upset at BT Murrayfield, going down 44-38 and he reckons they gave Scotland the fright they needed.

“People probably don’t give Samoa the credit in terms of the individual brilliance and how powerful athletes they are certainly I would rather be going into this game a wee bit worried rather than be over-confident,” he said.

“Certainly after the performance on the weekend from a defensive point of view, we all know that we’ve got to lift the intensity and be a lot better than we were, because it’s not good enough, particularly at home and I personally was very disappointed, as were the players. We’ve talked about that and a few of the leaders spoke about it today in the forwards meeting, so hopefully we’ll get a reaction.”

Saturday’s showing made for a difficult weekend on the domestic front, so he was glad that yesterday represented his first real chance to release his frustrations on those responsible.

"I take a lot of pride in what I do, representing Scotland,” said Taylor.

“I said to the players today that when people come to the games to watch Scotland play at home they see a lot of themselves in the players and shipping five tries at home isn't good enough.

Unfortunately sometimes my family cops the brunt of the disappointment, but we've got another game this week.

“We'll review the weekend, we need to be better and then focus everything this afternoon on New Zealand going forward.

“I think we were all pretty disappointed with how we defended, particularly where, over the last six months, there’s been games where we’ve defended really like the Australia game, the Ireland game, so to let ourselves down at home was really disappointing.

“A few things we can probably put down to it being the first time together for a long time, different guys coming in from different systems. I’m in a different situation this year in that I’m not in control of Glasgow so I don’t have as much time with the players, so it’s getting them on the same page as quickly as possible.

“The good thing about it is that we’ll be a hell of a lot better this weekend, but we’ll need to be because we’re under no illusions that unless we defend really well we’ll come second.”

He also suggested that because so much more is known about how the All Blacks play it may, in some ways, be more straightforward to prepare this week.

“Listen, teams play in different ways. The All Blacks will challenge in different areas form Samoa and Samoa challenged us in different ways that New Zealand mightn’t,” he said.