The ‘really unacceptable’ things Northampton are looking to fix

Northampton Saints sound like they are on a round two mission to greatly improve their discipline following last weekend’s campaign opening loss at Bath. The defending champions conceded 14 penalties at The Rec and they also had a yellow card brandished to new signing Josh Kemeny towards the end of their 16-38 defeat.

Seven of the 10 Gallagher Premiership teams that returned to action last weekend had double-figure penalty counts against them – with Northampton third on the list behind worst offenders Bristol, who gave up 17, and Exeter on 15.

Ahead of hosting the Chiefs at Franklin’s Gardens this Saturday, director of rugby Phil Dowson has put the heat on his team’s behaviour in the hope that it can keep them in the fight for an entire match, rather than slip away in the final quarter as happened at Bath after Fin Smith closed the margin to 16-21 with a 61st-minute penalty kick.

Asked what he made of the array of penalties his team conceded, Dowson explained: “The Dupont rule, we got caught twice on and that is something from a coaching point of view, from my point of view, we need to be better. We have been going hard at it at training but clearly not hard enough. So that’s disappointing, but there is some clear understanding around that.

“The things that are done that are really frustrating are we pushed somebody into touch when it was our lineout in their half, we slammed down on somebody when he was prone and they get an easy exit when we are on the ascendency and are on the front foot. We talked back to the ref, things that are really unacceptable because they let the pressure off a team.

“At 60 minutes I felt like we were we were on the front foot and we had some momentum but we didn’t convert that because of those more unacceptable ones.

“There is always going to be penalties. We don’t want to be bottom of the chart in terms of the penalties given away because we don’t want to be too clinical, we want to get in amongst the fight. But at the same time, we don’t want to be the team at the very top giving away the dumb ones.”

Gallagher Premiership round one penalties conceded

17: Bristol

15: Exeter (+1YC)

14: Northampton (+1YC)

13: Leicester (+1RC, 1YC), Sale

11: Gloucester

10: Harlequins

9: Saracens

8: Bath

7: Newcastle