Phil Dowson: Early season lessons more important than results for Northampton Saints
- Published
Phil Dowson (left) replaced Chris Boyd as Saints director of rugby last season
Northampton Saints director of rugby Phil Dowson says learning lessons is more important than results in the early weeks of the new season.
Saints have lost two of their three Premiership Rugby Cup games so far.
The latest was a narrow 39-38 defeat at Bristol, but they did outscore the home side by six tries to five.
"We're on a path and a plan to be ready for a long season and a long run of games in the Premiership and Europe," Dowson told BBC Radio Northampton.
"I think at this stage of the season lessons are the most important thing because we're not going to get judged at the end of the season by our PRC [Premiership Rugby Cup] results."
Robbie Smith, Juarno Augustus, George Furbank and James Ramm all made their first appearances of the season from the bench, along with Emmanuel Iyogun, who had been out of action since January because of injury.
Ramm was among their try scorers, while Furbank kicked two conversions after replacing Fin Smith in the 45th minute.
Saints are third in their group and have only two games left to try and reach the semi-finals of a competition they won in 2019.
They travel to Bath on Saturday before Doncaster Knights visit Franklin's Gardens on 7 October.
"We clearly want to win the tournament, we want to have a semi-final at home. That's a tall order now but we've got to make sure that we've got our systems in place and we learn those harsh lessons today as opposed to in November or December," said Dowson.
"The way we've managed it in the last couple of weeks, is that nobody in their first outing has played 80 minutes.
"Moony [Alex Moon] probably played the longest in his 100th game and was very good but we didn't want him to necessarily go 80 minutes.
"The way we managed the bench, the way we gave guys 40 minutes - we'll hopefully give them a bit more time in the next couple of weeks to make sure they're as fit as they can be for the start of the Premiership season."
Northampton have reached the Premiership play-offs in the last two seasons before losing to eventual champions Leicester Tigers and Saracens.
They begin the new league campaign with a trip to Sale Sharks on 13 October.