Saints defence coach Vass sees plenty of room for improvement

But the coach believes there have been green shoots of recovery over recent months.

Saints have now won back-to-back matches ahead of Saturday's Gallagher Premiership trip to Wasps.

The black, green and gold have moved up to seventh in the table and in terms of points conceded, they are currently on 135, the sixth highest in the league, 45 more than top defenders London Irish.

However, Saints' defensive record is much better than the likes of Wasps (208 points conceded) and Bath (212 points conceded).

And Vass feels Saints' defence is improving all of the time, though he knows there is still plenty of work to be done.

He said: "We should have beaten Bristol and Bordeaux but it doesn't get better over three or four weeks, it gets better over six months to a year so you don't end up falling off a cliff like in the Quins game (when Saints lost 49-29 at Franklin's Gardens in November).

"You get to rely on it and concede fewer points per week and those stats become consistent.

"We were getting towards that consistency before the break (Saints were out of action for five weeks before winning at Gloucester last weekend), even with that Quins debacle.

"We were getting better and it is improving.

"It's not anywhere close to where we want it to be yet as a reliable aspect of our game.

"We need everybody to be doing the same thing at the same time otherwise you do get line-breaks and missed tackles.

"The longer the system is in place, the more it comes down to individual errors.

"The whole point about the defence and system is that everyone understands their role at any given moment.

"It takes time because you don't work with the same 15 people every week so you've got to coach 40 people to make those same decisions and understand their role.

"That's the challenge for any attack, defence or anything really."

Saints will certainly be tested this Saturday by a Wasps side who scored 34 points at the Gardens in the first game back from the first lockdown last August.

It was a continuation of a tough spell for Saints after Vass arrived at the end of January, with the club eventually winning just six of their 23 matches in all competitions in 2020.

So did Vass start to feel the heat as Saints slid down the league standings?

"No, I didn't think it was pressure even though it wasn't pretty and it wasn't a great thing to watch," said the former Saints scrum-half, who returned to the club after coaching at Montpellier.

"I didn't think we would achieve what we wanted to achieve in six months and not even in a year maybe, it will be down the line.

"I understand it's results-based and you might not get that time to do it, but if you try to keep fixing short-term problems, there will never be any consistency and you're never going to get

the semi-finals and finals you want.

"I didn't feel pressure because even in that Harlequins game there were things we were working on that worked and were good, but I totally get that no one wants to concede 49 points at home and that was a low point in terms of a scoreline."

And Vass says he has no issue with the criticism he and his fellow coaches received during the long losing streak, which spanned 12 matches before the win against Worcester on Boxing Day.

"I haven't got any problem with that - it's part of the job," Vass said.

"Yes, we were on a losing run, but it didn't really feel that way.

"The win and loss columns always tell the truth, but from my perspective defensively, I knew what I was doing was from scratch, coming mid-season in January.

"I could see improvements and I could see what I wanted to see in games coming along.

"I know the results weren't pretty on paper, but there were green shoots and it was coming.

"With some of the breaks, it can cut some of the momentum, one step forward, two back.

"You do have to win the games because that's the whole point, but from my perspective, I was seeing improvements that I wanted and we needed.

"I could see where we were going to get to and it always felt like we were improving along the way."

Alan Dickens was Saints' defence coach before leaving the club to become England Under-20s head coach in November 2019.

Jake Sharp then had a spell as interim defence coach before returning to his role as transition coach when Vass arrived.

"I liaised with Jake for a while before I came to make that transition as easy as possible," Vass said.

"I knew him from playing at Bedford and it was an easy conversation to have.

"It was the first time he'd done anything like that so we had some good conversations to try to make the transition as easy as possible.

"But to get a consistent and reliable defence is about creating habits, as a 15 and even as a squad, and it takes time.

"Anything mid-season, you can't come in and make big changes so I just tried to change a few strategic things around player positions, back-field cover, full-back and nine's role, things that would be fairly simple to adapt quite quickly.

"From there, it's about building habits and creating habits and keeping them for a period of time and for future development.

"I didn't come in and change the whole thing - you can't do that mid-season."

So what is Vass's defensive philosophy?

"The overall idea is to get the ball back, and we try to coach ways to do that as fast as possible," he said.

"We have to become more consistent in what we're doing, how we defend, how we move and it's not an individual thing - it's a 15-man thing so that we can get results we can rely on.

"There's no naming names what type of defence it is, we just want a consistent one and one we can rely on.

"We have to understand it (Saints' free-flowing style) is one of our strengths and that it's about choosing the right times to do those things.

"It's not high risk if it's done at the right time and we're just trying to coach those right choices.

"If it's right to kick, kick - and if it's right to carry, carry.

"I don't have any problem with how we play, it's just about choosing the right time to do it.

"If you do it at a bad time, it will have consequences like against Bath last year when it was a really tight game and we dropped one ball and they scored.

"You want to coach the players to make the right choices and I don't see our style as a problem."

Vass is working hard to help ensure Saints make it three wins in a row at the Ricoh Arena this weekend, but he admits he will never truly be satisfied with his work as there are always things to improve on.

"Nearly everything is avoidable and there's always something we can improve," he said.

"If we're tackling at 90 per cent, I want us tackling at 95 per cent.

"There are always ways to get better so I'll never be happy."