IT was revealed on Saturday that the home dressing room at Murrayfield is to undergo a makeover by the time the 6 Nations ticks round in February. So little was going Scotland’s way for long stretches of the encounter against Argentina that you wondered if the coaching staff might be inclined to start taking the paint off the walls of the old one there and then.

Thankfully, though, a combination of a cleverly-worked try with 15 minutes remaining from Sean Maitland and some eccentric Argentinian goal-kicking was enough to spare the Scots a dressing room dressing down. Things certainly felt a lot better having signed off the old place with a hard-earned victory rather than a second home loss of the autumn.

After 25 years in the old one, not only will a change of logistics - born of a “joint decision” between Townsend and the SRU management - allow the coach to face his entire group whilst addressing them, it will no doubt be decked out with every bell and whistle going, everything the Scotland coach feels can help his team to victory. Such marginal gains might just pay dividends in a World Cup-year 6 Nations campaign where they face what is sure to be a trio of hard-fought home matches against Italy, Ireland and Wales.

Saturday’s performance was so utterly out-of-keeping with what went before it, against Fiji and South Africa, that in a way it seemed wrong to over-analyse. Scotland, after all, had significantly pared back their game plan in reaction to the damp conditions and the slippy ball they encountered in Edinburgh. Maybe they had pared it back a little too much.

It was Argentina’s misfortune to have the better of almost every statistical category on the day apart from the two most important ones, the final score and the try count. The Pumas had 60% of the possession, and 58% of the territory, conceding seven penalties to Scotland’s ten, and being perfect in both the scrum and the line-out. No wonder the dominant emotion amongst Gregor Townsend’s side afterwards was simply relief about the hard-headed decision-making down the stretch which was enough to tough out this victory.

“When you play in these scrappy games, when you don’t play at your best but still feel you have won against a really good Argentina side, you can’t be too hard on yourselves,” insisted Edinburgh lock Grant Gilchrist. “Sometimes things won’t go to plan, sometimes things won’t be all firing. It won’t always be the kind of rugby we want to play but the win is all that matters.

“It was a really greasy ball and that puts skills under pressure,” he added. “It allowed defences to fly up – we did it to them pretty well, they did it to us pretty well too. It creates errors, that’s just the way it is. It takes longer to get the ball through your hands and that allows defences more chances to get on top.”

“What went on in the line-out? A number of things! We were maybe a little bit spooked by what they were trying to do, thinking a little bit too much about the weather conditions. We maybe tried to alter to the conditions rather than go with what we planned and I think that is a good learning to go forward. They are hot on the breakdown too. While I thought we got there quickly and retained our ball but it was hard because we weren’t making the gain line a lot of the time.”

While this is an area Scotland must sharpen up on - rainy conditions like these aren’t unheard of in Japan in October and are almost guaranteed in Scotland at Six Nations time - all in all this has been a strong autumn for Northern hemisphere sides just a year out from the Rugby World Cup. As content as Townsend is with a period which has seen valuable playing time for emerging talents like Sam Skinner, Adam Hastings and George Horne, the exploits of Ireland, Wales and England have all stolen a bit of their thunder.

“We’ve had a good autumn,” insisted Gilchrist. “The Six Nations still seems a long way away but on the whole we’ve done well. Obviously, we would have loved to have won those narrow defeats against Wales and South Africa. We feel that we let ourselves down and we could have won those. But if we do take the good stuff that we did and make e some improvements then we will back ourselves against anybody.”

The focus now falls on big matches in the club game, with Gilchrist knowing there are no locks to be involved when the big matches tick round again. This squad requires no facelift; it just requires everyone involved to make sure they remain part of the furniture. “The second rows have all put their hands up pretty well across the autumn so I am sure it will a hard decision going forward,” said Gilchrist. “I know in my position there are players there who can come in and take my spot.”