Scotland captain hails 'impressive' teammate after USA thrashing and hopes one coach is pleased

The Scots ran in 13 tries - with McDowall himself among the scorers - but the Glasgow Warriors centre was also pleased to keep the Americans out. The visitors threatened on a couple of occasions to cross the whitewash but the hosts held firm.

Scotland worked with a new defensive coach in Lee Radford this week and McDowall remarked that the resoluteness of the team would have pleased him.

“It was great fun,” said McDowall. “I think we talked about it before the game, just going around and everyone focused on doing their own role. It was obviously a special day for Duhi [van der Merwe, 50th cap] and the boys getting their debuts. We wanted to make it a special day for them and I think you saw the effort and the physicality of the boys playing when we did that.

“It's actually something we touched on a bit during the week with a sports psychologist just saying that if they got an early score, if we got a couple of early scores, it didn't matter, we just reset and went back to our process. I thought we were really clinical with our exits. We didn't try to push it too early and play to width and play around them. It was really good, we stuck to the system.

“Probably the most pleasing part is when we scored, we exited really effectively. In games in the past, looking back to that Portugal game last year, it was maybe a similar type of group, we probably lost control of the game a little bit in the last 20 minutes and let them back from a couple of soft scores. Hopefully Lee's a happy man with his first match, but probably the most pleasing part was the way we kept the foot on the floor.”

McDowall also had words of praise for his Glasgow Warriors teammate Jamie Dobie, who scored a hat-trick, dictated play and shone both at scrum-half and on the wing.

“He's an impressive athlete,” remarked McDowall. “For someone to be able to go from scrum half to wing in a test match and not look out of place, it's very impressive. He's done his basics really well tonight, which I think is a really important part for him, but then he brings his flashes of brilliance as well.”

It was a sore night for the Americans, with their captain Jason Damm admitting: “When you get beat 85-0, it is easy to say that everything went wrong, but there were some things in the game which were very clear. Scotland were clinical in exploiting a couple of areas, they exploited them a number of times, so there are some common themes we can work on a shore up going forward.”