Rory Hutchinson: Northampton made ‘every error’ against Newcastle

Northampton – who scored four tries – were without most of their international stars, Alex Mitchell and Alex Coles both injured, and others rested after Six Nations duty.

But Hutchinson did not offer that as an excuse and said: “We’ve got to be able to understand situations quicker. Their one game plan was to mess up our breakdown in a PC way and we didn’t react quick enough.

“We’ll use this as getting the cobwebs out and look forward to next week (away to Saracens). We hold ourselves to higher standards than that but we won, that’s the most important thing, keeping that (100%) streak (at home) alive.”

Director of rugby Phil Dowson thanked supporters at Franklin’s Gardens for helping carry the team through with their noisy backing.

“We don’t talk about results, we don’t talk about winning and losing, we talk about performance and there’s loads of elements, attack, defence, set-piece, kick game, that we can be better at,” he said.

“But for those guys who were put under pressure against a (Newcastle) group that came out swinging to see what this run-in is going to be like, it was an incredibly valuable experience.”