The game marked Saints\u2019 final friendly match-up before they head into the PREM Rugby Cup next week, beginning their campaign with a trip to Saracens on Friday (19 September, kick-off: 7.30pm).\u00a0<\/p>\n
And as such, there were several Northampton players making their first appearances of the term \u2013 such as the three try scorers in newcomer Chick and longer-term Saints Pearson and Hendy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Of those fresh faces, Dowson said: \u201cLots of guys hadn\u2019t played for a long time and it was the first game of the season for guys like Hutch (Rory Hutchinson<\/a>) and Manny (Emmanuel Iyogun<\/a>).<\/p>\n \u201cWe had guys playing for the first time like Danilo Fischetti<\/a>, Chicky and Cleopas Kundiona<\/a>. I thought they were all excellent and they\u2019ve fitted in so well.\u201d<\/p>\n With Saints heading firmly back into regular season rugby next week, and the Gallagher PREM season ramping up in earnest off the back of Northampton\u2019s trip to Saracens, Dowson is hoping to welcome more players back into the fold in the coming weeks.<\/p>\n On selection, Dowson said: \u201cIt\u2019s obviously injury dependent and we\u2019ve got to get through a couple of training days, England training days as well, so we\u2019ll wait and see how people come out of that.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ll wait and see what the outcome was from this game and we\u2019ll make a decision with all roads leading to PREM Round 1 (against Exeter Chiefs on Sunday 28 September).\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The game marked Saints\u2019 final friendly match-up before they head into the PREM Rugby Cup next week, beginning…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":137748,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[5903,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-137747","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-rugby","8":"tag-rugby","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137747\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}