Falcons sneak off bottom

The Falcons were denied a draw last night after an apparently superb performance, but a losing bonus point takes us off bottom and puts the pressure back on Leeds ahead of their trip to Wasps on Sunday.

I say apparently a superb performance because after almost seven seasons of going around the country watching the Falcons, my pre-match luck finally ran out last night.

Work went fine (helped by starting at 5.30am) so I had a nice leisurely walk up to Kings Cross at half 2, but in the half hour between leaving work and getting to the station a fatality had unfortunately occurred at Peterborough, so all trains north were off.

Everyone was advised to go to St Pancras, head to Sheffield and go on from there. Only when I got on the 15.25 to Sheffield did I realise it would take two and a half hours to get there, and then probably the same to Newcastle.

Hopefully I'd get to KP for the second half. Or perhaps not quite, as I had forgotten that the kick-off was 7.45pm and just laughed when I read it in the Metro.

It dawned on me that if there were any further big delays, I might be best getting off in York or somewhere and just finding a pub to watch the game, and head up to Newcastle later. Perhaps Ma Leipy and I would end up watching the last ten minutes in the Centurion.

But the trains behaved, despite the rugby gods having a laugh by a bloke in a Tiggers shirt walking past me and finding myself sitting nowhere else but LEEDS half an hour before kick-off!

Finally about 8.40pm we pulled into Newcastle, and Ma Leipy and I hopped into a taxi. “Kingston Park rugby ground, quick as you can please!”

So with 25 minutes left the score was 9-15 and the TV referee had just denied Northampton a try. The Falcons struggled initially from then to get out of their 22 but were helped by Callum Clark being sin-binned for a late hit on Jimmy Gopperth – I'm glad it hasn't taken a broken leg for a referee to finally do something about other teams targetting Jimmy in this way.

Unfortunately Greg Garner did not see Phil Dowson throw his arms into Jimmy's face in another, but less dangerous, late hit.

Gopperth reduced the deficit to just three points with a penalty as last 20-minute nerves started. Finally with four minutes left Mark Sorenson dumped a Falcons player on his neck, but despite the South Stand demanding blood the referee decided a penalty was justice enough, and Gopperth put the noise out of his mind to equalise.

Unfortunately Mr Garner wasn't so picky about Northampton players diving all over a ruck on our line and the Saints moved the ball wide to the right, and with our defence sucked in Chris Ashton scored the winning try, Stephen Myler converting.

Northampton decided not to go for the bonus point and kicked into touch following the restart, which was kind of a relief to me at least. Two points would have been better than one but one is infinitely better than zero.

So hopefully Leeds will now feel a bit of a low that they are bottom of the Premiership again after their relief last week, and will be a bit more nervous when they go to Wasps on Sunday.

This relegation battle is nowhere near over despite what many may have thought after we lost to Leeds. However, while a losing bonus point was decent last night, we can't rely on them alone. We could really do with beating Leicester on Friday.