Scotland missed “the best opportunity in our history” to beat New Zealand, says head coach Gregor Townsend.

The hosts put up 23 unanswered points having initially trailed 14-0, but New Zealand punished Jack Dempsey’s yellow card with two late tries.

“We’re disappointed. There so much to be proud of but we didn’t see it through,” Townsend told Amazon Prime.

“It was a show of resilience after going 14-0 down to one of the best teams in the world, but we didn’t get the win.

“You don’t get to play New Zealand very often and that’s the best opportunity in our history we’ve had to beat them.”

The Scotland head coach added that the loss ranked alongside the defeat by Japan which put his side out of the World Cup in 2019, and said some mistakes in the final quarter were costly.

“We scored 23 points to nil during a 50-minute period so those margins you have to kick on and win. You have to see out the win and we didn’t do that,” Townsend added.

“I felt our management of when to play and when to kick was excellent and our chase was outstanding, but we let them back in with a couple of errors.”

Scotland legend Doddie Weir took the match ball out onto the field at Murrayfield to mark five years since his foundation to raise money for motor neurone disease research was set up.

The former Lions lock did the same back in 2017 when it was launched after his diagnosis with the disease.

Scotland captain Jamie Ritchie spoke to Weir on the pitch before kick-off.

“I said to Doddie before we went out: ‘We want to do it for you’. I think he would be proud of the way we performed. It’s just unfortunate we were on the wrong side of the result,” he said.

“We were the better team for the majority of the game. Our next step now is we’ve got to win those matches.”