Boyd salutes Saints after 'gutsy and gritty' success at Exeter

The black, green and gold had lost on their past 10 visits to Exeter, with that streak stretching all the way back to February 2014.

But they finally ended the hoodoo, earning a 13-12 success in dramatic fashion as Ollie Sleightholme rushed out to kick a Joe Simmonds conversion attempt into the stands.

Simmonds had started his run-up but Sleightholme got there first to pull the plug on a game that was played in a mudbath and amid strong winds.

Saints won it thanks to a first half try from Shaun Adendorff and eight points from the boot of Piers Francis.

And Boyd said: "It was a gutsy and gritty performance.

"We know coming to Sandy Park on a fairly heavy ground is not perfect for us, and it might not be perfect for them either, but we've struggled at places like this, like at Bath.

"So to grind out a win with a gutsy performance is very pleasing."

And Boyd says Saints deserved the win, which is their fourth in a row and which moves them into the Gallagher Premiership top four.

"If he (Simmonds) had kicked that goal, we would probably have been unlucky because over the 80 minutes we did enough to deserve the victory," Boyd said.

"The difference in the end to when we've come here in the past, when Exeter have got five metres from the goal-line, they've usually scored fairly easily against us.

"Today, our goal-line defence work and set piece stuff was pretty decent, particularly our scrum.

"The difference for us was that we fronted up physically close to the goal-line.

"We won the toss and decided to play against the wind and that can backfire because you can be 30 points down at half-time and it's too hard to chase, but we felt if we could match them physically and chew up the first bit, we might be able to control the game in the second half.

"As you saw, playing into the wind, it's pretty hard to play territory - you've just got to hold onto the ball and do the best you can.

"We defended much better than we have in the past and that was the deciding factor."

So how much work went into Saints' gargantuan defensive display?

"It's fairly topical around contact in training at the moment," Boyd said.

"Ten per cent of that performance is technical and 90 per cent is desire that you can't train.

"There were some technical adjustments around what they've done to us in the past and that requires no real training, just walking through stuff.

"We talked about the fact we needed to stand up there because in the past we haven't.

"We did it and it wasn't about the training time that went into it."