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Champions Sarries begin with a win
By Ben Spratt
Premiership champions Saracens began the new season with an impressive 32-21 win at Newcastle Falcons on Sunday.
Newcastle enjoyed an impressive campaign last time out, but they struggled to stay with the visitors at Kingston Park as Alex Lewington crossed twice to set up an opening-weekend win.
Lewington's first try on the stroke of half-time and the follow-up conversion from Owen Farrell - last season's leading points scorer - opened up an eight-point lead after Jamie George had crossed earlier on.
Mark Wilson twice scored after the restart as the Falcons threatened a fightback, with Lewington responding to the first score to keep Sarries in front.
The task became a little more tricky when the visitors were reduced to 13 men following a pair of yellow cards, but Nick Tompkins returned from the sin bin to score with four minutes remaining and settle away nerves.
Finally out of sight, Farrell, consistent with the boot throughout, dispatched a penalty to cap the scoring and ensure a fine start to the campaign for the champions.
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Latest Comments
Finau is definitely operating on razor thin margins. He hasn’t done anything wrong… yet. But a player going into contact 6 inches lower than he is expecting, without him even knowing, will end in disaster. You can imagine a situation where the pass dies on Edmed and he has to bend down a little lower to catch it at the last second. Finau’s hit would have been catastrophic. The margins are just too fine. He needs to study how PSDT, at 6’7”, manages to drop his tackle height and exert just as much force with close zero danger of taking someone’s head off. Given how poorly NZ has adapted to lower their tackle height, and that this issue which has plagued the ABs for years and played a big part in them not winning the World Cup, I thought NZR and all SR coaches would be prioritising sorting this issue out. If I was Razor I would be on the phone to Clayton MacMillan and Samipeni Finau saying exactly that. Finau is a monster and shaping up to be the closest thing to Kaino since Kaino, but I wouldn’t risk selecting him for the ABs at the moment.
Go to commentsThe surprising stat I saw in the Blues game when showing Sotutu equaling the Blues forwards record was that Akira has not scored a try since 2019. Now my memory is pretty bad when it comes to those sorts of the things, I can remember his AB try though, but anyway I can’t see I can remember his last blues touchdown or any in recent years. Surely that still has to be a bogus stat. Maybe excludes SRA games?
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