GREGOR Townsend was pleased with the Six Nations campaign but he feels there is still plenty of scope for growth within his team.

And he wants Scotland to build on that as they bid to prime themselves for the World Cup later this year.

The Scots enjoyed their first top-three finish in the championship since 2018 after beating England, Wales and Italy and losing only to the two highest-ranked teams in the world, Ireland and France.

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He said: “If you don’t win all your games, you will look back on the games you lost and wonder how you could have done better, but overall I was really pleased with our togetherness, our intent, our ability to score tries and our ability to come back in games when we’re down.

“We’ve learned a lot and we’ll be a better team for this experience. We were determined to finish higher than third. There were so many positives for our supporters, but we know we can be better and we’re working towards that.”

Attention now turns firmly towards the World Cup in France this autumn, with Townsend and his players due to reconvene in just two-and-a-half months to begin their preparations.

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And there is a fresh sense of optimism among supporters that Scotland might be able to find a way out of a World Cup group that also contains Ireland and South Africa.

“We’ll have some time off as coaches because the Six Nations is a fairly intense period, but we’ll be quickly back into selection thoughts,” Townsend said. “We’ve got a World Cup camp that starts at the start of June which is not too far away.

“We’ve got to pick a squad for that and then work towards delivering our best rugby for the World Cup, including our warm-up games.

“It will be a very tough World Cup pool with the number one and number three teams in our pool, but we’re number five in the world and we know we can take on any team on our day.”