Dickson wants Saints to excite in Dublin

And he is urging his team-mates to rediscover the sort of form that has seen them lose just three games this season when they head to the Aviva Stadium on Saturday evening.

Saints suffered a 40-7 humbling at the hands of Leinster last weekend, shipping six tries on a tough night at Franklin’s Gardens.

But they don’t have to wait long for another crack at the Irish side and Dickson believes there are lots of reasons to remain upbeat ahead of the Dublin reunion.

“There’s plenty of positives (from last weekend),” said the England scrum-half. “We stuck in there, we scored in that last 20 minutes.

“To get nilled at home would have been embarrassing but we stuck in there, scored some points and played a bit in the second half.

“That was the main thing to come out of it: when the chips were down we played some rugby, made some breaks.

“We didn’t always score but we had the courage to go wide and throw the ball around. We’ve got to do that from the start at the weekend.

“We were a bit tight, a bit blocky and against a good teams like that, their defence is always going to be difficult to break down.

“We’ve got to go there and play some exciting rugby like we have done this season.”

Saints went into last weekend’s game on the back of a seven-match winning streak.

That good run of form made the Leinster drubbing hard to comprehend, but Dickson is determined to show it was merely an anomalie.

“It was a shock,” he said. “I don’t think anyone saw it coming but it happens in professional sport.

“It’s how you bounce back. It shows the character of your players and the staff as well.

“You can either go into your shell or you can bring out the character and start fighting for this week. That’s what the boys have done.

“We’ve had some really positive meetings, looked at what went wrong and we’ve got to nullify it this week.”