Wood so proud after hitting major milestone at Saints

Tom Wood made his 200th Saints appearance in Dublin on Saturday evening

The flanker was in the thick of the action once again on Saturday evening, bringing up his double century in the black, green and gold during the 50-21 Champions Cup defeat at Leinster.

Wood skippered a youthful Saints side, who shipped seven tries at the Aviva Stadium.

And though the 33-year-old did not want to make the event about him, he did admit how happy he was to have reached such a major milestone in club colours.

"It's been a long time in the trenches taking grenades at the coalface," said Wood, who moved to Saints from Worcester Warriors in 2010.

"It's not really about me, I don't want to make it about me.

"I'm just incredibly proud to have been able to pull on the shirt that many times at a great club and I just hope to continue doing so for at least the next year or two."

Wood was hit with a harsh sin-binning during the first half in Dublin, but he returned to the field and continued to show his trademark warrior spirit.

Saints couldn't take anything from the game though, as they suffered a second heavy defeat in as many weeks at the hands of Leinster.

"The boys are hurting, they're wearing it pretty hard and rightly so because we're professionals and we come out to give a good account of ourselves," Wood said.

"It was 50 points and it's desperately disappointing because we expect more of ourselves.

"But firstly credit to Leinster because they are a class outfit.

"They punished us for just about every error over the past two weeks.

"We did some good things at times, a lot of good things last week and we were right in the fight in the first half last week.

"But every error we made, every time we started to build some pressure and coughed the ball up or gave a penalty away, they were down the other end and they took points on just about every occasion.

"Credit to them really.

"In large areas of the game we thought we had parity, especially in the set piece because I don't think they got real dominance there over the past couple of weeks.

"Scrum time we were at least on par if not dominant at times, and that's with a lot of key personnel missing as well.

"If you add Courtney (Lawes), (Alex) Moon, David Ribbans, the Franks brothers, Mikey Haywood, Teimana Harrison, there's a lot of firepower we're lacking so credit to the young lads who have stepped up and done an unbelievable job to contain a very tough Leinster pack."