McCall bags Saracens performance after narrowly avoiding shock upset

Saracens director of rugby Mark McCall believes a narrow 37-31 win over Bath shows just how competitive the Gallagher Premiership is despite some disappointment in his side.

Victory moves Sarries to the top of the Premiership table and means Bath remain towards the bottom of the table, though this was a fiercely-contested match between the two.

Both sides scored four tries each with a couple of penalties swinging it in the hosts’ favour and, while McCall believes it shows how competitive the league is, he was also dissatisfied with some aspects of Saracens’ performance.

He said: “It was a game that shows the Premiership is incredibly competitive and if your attitude is not what it needs to be, you can get pulled into a game that we could have easily lost.

“Whether we deserved to lose or not, I’m not sure, but it’s a game we could have lost. It was a very disappointing performance.

“It manifests itself in certain things. You look at how often we were turned over at the breakdown today and I think we had a lot of players that were happy to do the comfortable and big stuff, but not the small stuff that everybody needs to do.

“If you want to play the kind of game we want to play, people doing those detailed things well is a necessity and it wasn’t today.

“When we did turn the ball over, a lot of their scores came from our mistakes, they were very clinical with that.”

Tries from Alex Goode, Max Malins, Elliot Daly and Alex Lewington and stellar goalkicking from Owen Farrell secured the result for the table-topping hosts.

Bath took the game to the wire, thanks to scores from Matt Gallagher, Joe Cokanasiga, Max Ojomoh and Wesley White along with the boot of Orlando Bailey.

Meanwhile, despite defeat, Bath head of rugby Johann Van Graan was pleased with his squad’s continued growth.

He added: “We played better than we did last week.

“At half-time we were 16-10 down but very calm and then one loose pass and the yellow card and they fought their way back.

“This was our best performance away from home, we are very disappointed not to come away with five points.

“We said last week we need to be better – and we certainly were.

“Over the last six rounds we have been the stronger team finishing every weekend. We are getting fitter, getting better conditioned and players are working very hard and believe in what we do.”