Saints Q&A: Boyd looks back on a frustrating season

After sitting pretty in the Gallagher Premiership top two at the 10-game mark, while booking their place in the Champions Cup quarter-finals, the slide started.

Saints won just two of their final 14 matches in all competitions before being forced to forfeit their Premiership final-day fixture at Gloucester.

They bowed out of Europe at Exeter, who would go on to make the showpiece final.

And boss Chris Boyd was left to reflect on what had gone wrong for his initially promising side.

Here he is addressing Saints’ 2019/20 issues in typically honest fashion...

Q: How did you spend the final day of the season after the game at Gloucester got cancelled?

A: “I was at Franklin’s Gardens with a group of hardy Saints supporters who had gathered there to see the final day.

“It was a bit surreal because they were supposed to be there watching us play Gloucester but I spent pretty much the whole afternoon at the Gardens.”

Q: Were you glad to see the season end early?

A: “I would have liked to have played on the Sunday to see how those young fellas would have coped.

“We picked a pretty young team.

“It only gives us one game now, against Worcester on Friday, November 13, and then we play Sale on Friday, November 20 in the first round of the Premiership.

“Boys get three weeks’ leave and then three weeks’ pre-season and then we’re back into it.

“It’s a pretty short period of time and some pretty steep changes need to be made.”

Q: What are the players up to at this time?

A: “Unfortunately after the Sale fallout, I think half of them are having to isolate for the first 14 days so you don’t have to be Einstein to work out that if you’ve got 21 days of leave and the 14 days are in isolation, there’s not much leave to be had and there’s not many venues to go to either.

“We were hoping to keep the gym and things open but we’ve obviously had a bit of a post-Sale outbreak ourselves so we’ve had to close that down and go through a patch of deep clean and get ourselves reorganised so it’s been pretty disruptive.

“But whatever the world is throwing you at the moment you’ve got to be resilient, nimble and get on with the cards you’ve got and do the best you can.

“It’s a really difficult one because to the best of my knowledge, from the people who have been exposed to Covid, we haven’t had anyone who has been critically ill.

“You have to take the whole thing seriously and obviously you’ve got family on the outside of the bubble who connect as well so it is tough to regulate.”

Q: How did you feel about having to forfeit the game at Gloucester?

A: “I didn’t think that was particularly fair, but the PRL had to set up a set of regulations to deal with what Covid was going to hand out and all the clubs agreed that if you were responsible for a game not going ahead then you would forfeit the points.

“Registrations need to be done by midday on the Friday and initially we were hoping to be able to find a tighthead, two looseheads and a hooker.

“We weren’t terribly optimistic about being able to do that, but I was very keen to see the young guys play.

“Having so many people coming in might have made a mockery of it, but the knock-on effect of them saying there was no loan players meant the only thing we could have done was to go down there with 20 players and have no tighthead, loosehead or hooker on the bench.

“And the ramifications of that just became nonsensical so we just had to give it away.”

Q: Have the restrictions since rugby returned affected your ability to coach?

A: “Massively so.

“More than anything, it hasn’t suited us to have to play Saturday, Wednesday, Saturday.

“Without being disrespectful, the teams who play a very simplistic game have handled that much better than ours, which is a little bit more complex with a little bit more coaching involved and more decision making.

“It’s been really tough for us to keep coaching.

“We’ve suffered from making far too many fundamental errors and taken too long to score points.

“We’ve kept trying but as I’ve said a lot - you don’t win games by trying - you win them by scoring more points than the other team and we’ve been too slow to score.

“We’ve got a very steep curve to get that back on track because we are committed to playing the way we want to play.”

Q: Are you going to adjust your game plan and do you feel teams have worked Saints out a bit?

A: “Yes and no.

“You don’t have to be very smart to work out anyone’s game plan - it’s about your ability to impact that.

“I’ve gone back and had a look at the start of the season and the end of last season when we were playing pretty decent footy and they were the same guys.

“If you’re committed to it, then you’ve just got to be better at delivering it.

“We just got ourselves into a bit of a downward spiral and failed to dig ourselves out fast enough.”

Q: Do you feel frustrated or angry? What is your feeling now the season has finished?

A: “It’s frustration but I think we have to be tolerant and I’m asking for the fans to be tolerant.

“Everyone’s in a hurry for this group to succeed but we’re the youngest team in the league constantly on a Saturday.

“We have got some good rocks to build our game around but this group of people needs to be judged over the next two or three years, not over the next two or three months.

“We’re on a journey of excellence and if you look at where Exeter are now, we might be three or four years behind where they are.

“It’s the same with Saracens and with other teams who have had good patches.

“Everyone is very disappointed with the results and you can’t sugarcoat it.

“The previous year was deemed to be a success because we made play-offs after the year before that was turbulent and disappointing.

“The success was built on a wave of momentum, which deserted us and we were unable to get back.

“That wave will come back again with this group working hard.

“I’m frustrated because I know that when I sit down in front of the boys, I know there are solutions in there for us to deliver a much better performance.”

Q: Was it a mistake to adopt the two-team policy rather than going weak-strong during the period when you had midweek games?

A: “Outcome would tell you it was the wrong thing to do.

“We talked about it as a coaching group and I think we’d modify it slightly but still go down a similar route.

“When we looked at the number of points we had and the number we needed, we looked at our schedule and our three midweek games were Sale at home, Bristol away and Bath at home. We thought those three games were far too important to put a B side out in.

“We spent hours trying to work out how we could adhere to the fact nobody could play in all of the games.

“When we challenged everything and put it into the mixer, we felt the best way to get the best amount of points we could was to have a two-team policy.

“If we’d have picked up a couple of wins at the start, it might have been a brainwave and maybe in three months’ time when people are starting to creak, it could have some long-term positive effects, or they could be negative effects.

“In short, outcome would say it was the wrong decision.

“The biggest decision I regret is that we sanitised our game against Wasps because we thought the referee’s interpretation was going to be different to what it ended up being, and we got butchered at the breakdown against Wasps. That was my fault.

“I said we needed to be much more clean and we adopted some policies that came back to bite us hard. We’ve changed them back since, but we got that game wrong.”

Q: How much have the coaches been affected by this bad run in terms of confidence?

A: “I don’t think anyone has been affected by it.

“Talking about confidence is a self-fulfilling prophecy really. We played poorly.

“The thing I’m most satisfied with is that everyone is still aligned, they’re still turning up, we’re still enjoying the challenge.

“We 100 per cent can’t hide behind the fact we didn’t play anywhere near as well as we did before, and we just need to find the solutions to make sure it doesn’t continue.”

Q: How have you found it personally?

A: “I’ve found it a great challenge, to be honest.

“You’re not involved in high performance anything to lose so whether you’re in music or arts or sport or academics, if you fancy yourself at the high performance end, it’s all about winning.

“So that creates a big disappointment that you’re not winning, but the reason you don’t win is either someone is performing better or you’re not performing well enough.

“We’ve got to go back and put the building blocks in place for us to get a performance, and when we get that, we will get our share of wins.”

Q: Does recent form make you think any differently about your future at Saints?

A: “I’m not going anywhere unless I get sacked.

“It’s 100 per cent that there’s a commitment from the medical people, the strength and conditioning and the coaches to have a journey from a young team into something we hope can be special.”