Sale Sharks 14 Northampton Saints 28

By Whaley Shark
April 5 2014

All good things come to an end, and our winning run certainly did on Thursday night, as Northampton Saints visited Salford for the second time in a fortnight and outgunned us to end our Amlin hopes convincingly.

We started quite brightly, as the scrappy opening passages gave us a scrum penalty in midfield and Nick Macleod put a precision touchfinder right into the corner. A couple of phases on the Saints line, and Henry Thomas battered his way over after just seven minutes.

Saints then demonstrated the power of the catch and drive, scoring tries at 19 and 30 minutes, with both opportunities developing from our errors and indiscipline. Just for a change, Saints’ right wing Ken Pisi sneaked down the narrow side of a ruck on half way, got away from a Sale tackler and made it into our 22. As the defence scrambled to reorganise, a neat kick through set up a try for Ben Foden on 35 minutes. Finally, just to convince us we’d lost by half time, Henry Thomas was binned after being penalised at a scrum on Saints’ 10 metre line. Saints put the kick into touch and it was rolling maul time again and, at 28-7 down, that pretty much looked like it for our European ambitions.

Saints’ approach to the second half was straightforward ‘What we have, we hold’. They were largely content to keep us at arm’s length, though they exploited any opportunities that came their way. In particular, Nathan Fowles gave a lovely individual cameo in defence, falling on the ball near our line, dancing round a couple of attackers and getting a decent clearance away, to deny Ben Foden what looked like a certain try.

As time ran out, we did the catch and drive thing ourselves, from a penalty into the corner, and Viliami Fihaki scored, to give some superficial respectability to the scoreline, and the last five minutes passed in stalemate. But the truth is that we weren’t in this game after the first ten minutes. We were outclassed by Saints, who were clearly not prepared to go home empty-handed a second time. Good luck to them in the semi-final.

More generally, the less said about this game the better. I have no problem with the extensive team changes- you can’t just play the same guys week in, week out. There’s maybe something in there about motivation and match sharpness of players who’ve not seen too much action this season, but if this result turns out to be the price for hammering Quins and Tigers over the next month, fair enough. Time to move on…….