Phil Dowson: ‘Fin Smith is definitely in the conversation’ for England spot after shining in Northampton’s win over Exeter
Northampton Saints director of rugby Phil Dowson and fly-half Fin Smith.
Northampton Saints director of rugby Phil Dowson hailed his side’s decisiveness after they got their Premiership campaign on track with a 30-24 victory over Exeter Chiefs on Saturday.
After losing their Round One clash with Bath last week, Northampton bounced back with a solid performance and held a 30-10 lead with 20 minutes remaining after Alex Coles, Chunya Munga and Rory Hutchinson crossed for tries and Fin Smith kicked 15 points.
However, a brace of tries from Immanuel Feyi-Waboso in the latter stages of the game – along with a first-half try from Olly Woodburn and nine points from the boot of Josh Hodge – meant it was a nervy finish for Saints but they held on for a home victory.
“We talked last week about how we were going to mark our performance on our intent and our energy, our desire to go and be physical and work hard for each other,” Dowson said.
“I thought we sort of did that against Bath but with loads of inaccuracies in our game, and I thought we would bang at it again tonight.
‘We were way more decisive in this game’
“I think you can see the crew are emotionally invested in what we are trying to do, but we were way more decisive in this game.
“Defensively I thought we were brilliant in terms of when we did get broken we worked hard to get back and make them go through more phases.
“We got a ton of turnovers, which is something we’re sort of looking at, and we dug in, which fundamentally against a side like Exeter is what you have to do.
“We’re working hard. There are a couple of things we obviously need to fix up. There’s a high shot in there, which leads to the yellow card which puts a little bit more pressure on us, but those things are sometimes going to happen as well.”
Dowson had special praise for young fly-half Smith whose superb performance would have caught the attention of England head coach Steve Borthwick ahead of the upcoming end-of-year internationals.
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“We always talk about his age, but I think he’s somebody who is just growing every week,” he said.
“He’s leading in terms of how we attack and how the game goes forward.
“There’s obviously a lot of competition for the England number 10 shirt. I only saw the first half of the Quins game (against Newcastle), with Marcus Smith back in and flying around doing some good stuff.
“It’s a great competition to have for Steve to make those decisions around. And there’s obviously George Ford in that mix as well, but I think Fin is definitely in the conversation.”
Meanwhile, despite being decimated by injuries to several backline players, Exeter director of rugby Rob Baxter was happy with his side’s performance.
“We have thought so much about targeting getting something from away games and playing in a way that gives us the best opportunity to do that,” he said.
“We got large parts of that right and we spent a lot of time in the right areas of the field.
‘We took a step forward today’
“We are still patchy on our individual error count, but I think collectively as a team we took a step forward today.”
Exeter were frequently penalised at the breakdown, particularly in Northampton’s 22, but Baxter said: “I think for a lot of that we can take responsibility for and some of it is fairly simple, and that’s the frustrating thing.
“We are forcing an awful lot that we should be able to let happen if we were a confident side, but that said, we have taken some pretty big steps forward from last week’s game against Leicester.”
