Saints showed 'huge character' to claim try bonus point in Bordeaux

The black, green and gold had a mountain to climb after heading in 24-7 down at half-time, having gone down to 13 men at one point during the first half due to yellow cards for Danilo Fischetti and Rory Hutchinson.

And though Bordeaux continued to pile on the points, Saints hit back with a few blows of their own in the second half as they eventually notched three further tries to add to Henry Pollock's superb opener.

It meant they could at least leave the raucous Stade Chaban-Delmas with a point.

And Saints boss Dowson said: "I've said it and the players have also touched on it, that there was huge character to continue to try to plug away despite the scoreline ballooning out.

"The effort we put in during the first half to try to keep them out when we were down to 13, 14 men for a long period of time obviously hurt us.

"But I'm incredibly proud of the effort to do that and the lads went after it and did the business to get that point.

"We'll find out next week how important that is, but from a character point of view, most importantly for me, it showed what we're about."

Saints host Scarlets in their final Investec Champions Cup pool stage match next Sunday, and Dowson feels his players will learn plenty from their tough experience in Bordeaux.

"I just mentioned in the changing room that maybe it's human nature but we generally always learn more from bitter defeats and credit to Bordeaux, they were excellent today," Dowson said.

"We'll take a huge amount from this game because we'll learn stuff from a technical and tactical point of view, but also from an emotional point of view in terms of what it's like to play in these sorts of places against these very high-quality teams.

"So as disappointed as we are, we knew we wanted to challenge ourselves, and we have, and we'll make sure we learn from that.

"They're the environments that you want to play in. We talked a couple of years ago about going to Munster, which is similar. Huge heritage, huge history, great team and really good in Europe as well.

"The atmosphere is something to be enjoyed - and I think the players will talk about that in terms of some of these away games where it is different, it is partisan, it is aggressive and that's what we want to be involved in.

"We obviously want to play better, but this is where we want to be sat."

Pollock was the pantomime villain at Stade Chaban-Delmas, but he didn't let the constant booing affect him as he grabbed two tries in a strong personal performance under huge pressure.

And Dowson said: "I thought he was very good.

"He's 20 and he's getting that heat. He's had one year of full professionalism and the crowd love to hate him.

"They love to hate him because he's very good, he's flamboyant, he gets stuck in and he's happy to wind people up. That's good for the game.

"It was interesting to see how he would approach today with the media speculation surrounding him - and I thought he was very good.

"There's loads of stuff in his game that we'd like him to be better at. There's a couple of things from a technical point of view, but if you asked him to turn up and go hard at it, I don't think (you can fault him).

"The crowd know it, he's a pantomime villain and they love to hate him, but they also respect him and enjoy watching him play because he's really good at rugby."