One minute from the interval French lock Jean Sousa picked up a yellow card and subsequent sin-binning for being repeatedly offside at the ruck - meaning the game swung in Scotland's favour.

Stand-off Alex Blair restored parity for the Scots going over for the all-important try after a period of sustained pressure.

It was from here that Scotland really started to earn the belief of the crowd, dominating the French.

However, a French counter-attack found them in Scotland's red zone and an adjudged intentional knock-on allowed Romain Barthelemy to make up for earlier missed kicks to put the visitors back in the lead, 8-5.

With just ten minutes to go, time was against Scotland and they were yet to capitalise on their second-half dominance until a French intentional knock-on offered them the chance to equalise once more.

Blair stepped up to the plate and sent the ball cleanly between the sticks to make it 8-8.

And Scotland head coach, Eamon John, said: "I'm disappointed. I thought the game was there for the taking. We started a little nervously but in the second-half played a lot more rugby and took our game to them.

"We picked up the tempo and entertained the crowd with some good rugby. I'm sure the crowd was really pleased with what they saw but we should have gone on and got the win."