‘They shut up shop with 20 minutes to go’ – Northampton players lament missed opportunity to stun Leinster
Northampton Saints' Courtney Lawes, George Furbank and Phil Dowson speaking after their defeat to Leinster
Northampton Saints full-back George Furbank believes Leinster went into their shell in the last quarter of their Champions Cup semi-final at Croke Park, opening the door for the English side to come agonisingly close to snatching a win.
The Saints trailed by 17 points early in the second half after James Lowe had completed his hat-trick, but the home side never scored again and were forced into an uncomfortable last few minutes by the Premiership leaders who never gave up.
Having earlier handled everything Northampton had thrown at them during an error-strewn first half performance, Leinster were suddenly on the back foot in the final quarter after handing the initiative to the Saints.
“They're obviously a quite aggressive 'D' (defence) so it's tough to get the ball in the wide channels and when you do get it in there, they're pretty aggressive in that wide breakdown and look to spoil that,” England full-back Furbank said.
"There's an element of frustration there because we knew that was going to come.
"We knew we had to play through them and in the first half we didn't look after the ball well enough and probably tried to force things that weren't really there to start off with.
"I think we calmed down after the first 20 minutes and created enough opportunities to score more points than we did.
“We've had plenty of experience of that throughout the season, you look back at Munster, Exeter, those two games we had to come from a deficit.
“Once we scored that try in the corner we definitely felt like we'd given ourselves a really good shot.
“It was all quite calm messages to be honest.
"We spoke about getting back in their half and putting the pressure back on them.
"They sort of shut up shop with 20 minutes to go and gave us a lot of kicks so it was about securing that and putting our game on the field.
"To be honest, I thought we were going to score down that left edge, we probably had the wrong people out there to score.
"We came close and put ourselves in a situation where we could have and potentially should have won that game.”
Captain Courtney Lawes said Northampton never believed Leinster, whose out-half Ross Byrne missed a penalty and two conversions, were never out of sight.
"I never felt like we were out of the game to be honest,” he said.
"In the second half, when they scored that early try, that was one of the points where we had to find ourselves as a team. I thought we did that. It's credit to the players that we can have something like that happen and find a way to get back on the horse and go back at them.
“To do that as a team is very good for going forward.
“The disappointing thing is we didn't really test them. We didn't really put our game out there how we wanted to, we dropped a lot of ball, gave away a lot of penalties. You can't win at the highest level if you're doing that kind of stuff.
“That was obviously where we lost the game but on the plus side, we were able to push one of the best teams in the world and showed that we're not going to get pushed over by anyone.
“There's a lot we can take from it and some really good learnings.”
