Boyd admits Saints' showing against Wasps wasn't worth the wait

That was Saints boss Chris Boyd's succinct assessment of his side's disappointing 34-21 defeat to Wasps at Franklin's Gardens on Sunday afternoon.

Saints had waited five long months to play a Gallagher Premiership game after Covid-19 called a halt to the rugby season back in March.

But they showed plenty of signs of rust as they shipped four tries against a far sharper Wasps side in the behind-closed-doors battle.

Lee Blackett's men were clinical, while Saints were profligate, scoring just twice, even though they played against 14 men for 20 minutes of the match due to the sin-binnings of Malakai Fekitoa and Lima Sopoaga.

And Boyd said: "It was a long wait for not a lot.

"It's pretty disappointing really because we thought we'd trained pretty well in the past two or three weeks and got ourselves to a good point.

"The endeavour needed to be matched by skill execution and individually and collectively our decisions and skills under pressure were fairly average to be honest.

"It's back to the drawing board."

Saints have now lost all four of their league matches at the Gardens in 2020, with their only win at home this year coming against Benetton in the Champions Cup.

It is a record that has seen them sink to sixth in the Premiership standings, with Wasps, who are now fourth, and Bath overtaking them this weekend.

And Boyd said: "Everyone's trying to stop us playing that rugby so for a period of time we might have to go back to playing a bit of territory and being a bit wiser with our option taking because we are getting closed down.

"It's a good challenge for our coaches and our senior players to find the key to unlock that."

One area where Wasps really dominated was the breakdown, with Jack Willis and Thomas Young having huge games.

"We're generally pretty heavily penalised," Boyd said.

"We might have been a little bit honest at the breakdown.

"They did very well. I don't think they were always on the right side of the law but however the referee interprets it, we've got to adapt to that.

"It's certainly an area we felt was going to be important for us and we didn't dominate it."

Saints had warmed up for the clash with Wasps by playing an inter-squad game at the Gardens nine days earlier.

And they didn't see such a sluggish performance coming on Sunday.

"I wouldn't have thought we were rusty because we've built the last three weeks up and we probably had a better performance against ourselves last Friday," Boyd said.

"It certainly wasn't complacency but we didn't dominate the breakdown, which we knew was going to be a big part of the game.

"Credit to them, but we didn't execute our skills under pressure and we made too many mistakes.

"What they created they converted, and what we created we squandered."