I’M BOYD UP
Saints’ boss on top despite Louis hat-trick
Northampton 33 Gloucester 26
NORTHAMPTON boss Chris Boyd paid tribute to Saints’ resilience as they swept back to the top of the Premiership despite a hattrick for Gloucester’s starlet Louis Rees-Zammit.
The clamour for a Wales Six Nations call-up at 18 for Rees-Zammit will intensify after the flying wing took his tally to nine in 11 senior appearances but his personal haul was still not enough to stop Northampton.
They hit the reset button after three successive defeats in front of a 15,200 sellout at Franklin’s
Gardens to move
Finto first place after a breathless game.
“We were happy to get away with the win because we came under a lot of pressure from Gloucester but we held our nerve,” said Boyd. “We know how congested the league is going to get from top to bottom, so you have to scrimp and scrape and grind out victories.
“We know this is really an accumulation phase and we just have to keep grabbing
Saracens
points and staying above those nasty lines across the table.”
Gloucester took two bonus points from their visit to Fortress Franklin’s – where Northampton are unbeaten in the league since April – after contributing four tries, three from ReesZammit (right).
His searing pace gave Gloucester a seventh-minute lead before he struck again in the 50th minute to finish off a sweeping attack down the left.
The hat-trick score came five minutes from time as the visitors pressed for victory but, with Piers Francis on target with two important penalties in the last quarter, Northampton squeezed home.
Francis had taken over the kicking duties when Dan Biggar was replaced at half time with a dead leg. Northampton also lost scrum-half Conus Reinach to a dead leg but not before the South Africa had raced over for two tries in the space of seven second-half minutes to build on Mike Haywood’s score before the break. Rees-Zammit’s finishing brought a nervy conclusion for Saints and, had it not been for brilliant cover tackles by Furbank on Danny Cipriani and Tom Collins on Matt Banahan, the game would have been Gloucester’s.