Adam Jones is known for his loose hair rather than his prowess on the loosehead but the 100-cap tighthead prop showed he could cut it on the other side of the scrum after finding himself on the pitch a mere seven minutes in, five months after he last played, having been summoned on to the Harlequins bench two hours before the kick-off when Joe Marler failed a fitness test.
Northampton had talked in the week about beating up Harlequins at forward, but they reckoned without Jones, who was not available at the start of the season following the death of his mother. At the moment he should have been blowing harder than the wind the Saints made no use of in the second-half, he showed gusto, as did his confrere on the other side of the scrum, Kyle Sinckler, the demolition man.
Jones gave away two penalties at the scrum in the first half as the early physical superiority established by Quins started to fade, but after the interval he found a way of keeping the Northampton tighthead, first Kieran Brookes and then Paul Hill, upright and then in reverse. It was the Wales veteran’s leg-pumping drive in the closing minutes that delivered his side’s final points with a penalty after Hill lost his bind under pressure and the crowd roared its assent. Sinckler was by then in the stand having been taken off after 69 minutes.
Under the gaze of Eddie Jones, Sinckler had caught the eye in a match that was not the easiest to watch, defaced by basic mistakes, penalties and two attacks who struggled to find space. Northampton were especially wasteful in possession as if their failure to establish themselves physically up front disarmed them.
The Saints recovered from going 8-0 down after 10 minutes and had two opportunities to go into the break ahead but Stephen Myler, having kicked his first two penalties, missed a couple from 30 and 35 metres. Nick Evans had squandered eight points from the tee, but when he did not return for the second period because of a calf strain, his replacement Tim Swiel took his four penalty opportunities to take his side home and above Northampton in the bottom half of the Premiership table.
The winning margin should have been greater but Quins, despite keeping their home record intact, do not have rippling confidence. They supplied the best individual performances, Jones, Sinckler, the wing Marland Yarde, who with England wings becoming an endangered species showed industry and power, and the second row James Horwill, whose alertness contrasted with Northampton’s formulaic approach.
Much huffing only yielded one try, one that was out of keeping with the rest of the match. Myler’s kick downfield was run back by Mike Brown and when Evans carried on the move, Horwill kept Luther Burrell occupied long enough for Joe Marchant, a temporary replacement for Jamie Roberts who was off the field with a cut to his head after being kicked inadvertently by Yarde, to free Tim Visser who gave the scoring pass to Alofa Alofa.
Quins thought they had scored a try after the interval when, after one of Sinckler’s rampaging runs, Luke Wallace crossed in the corner. The try was ruled out by the referee Ian Tempest on review: he decided that Visser had prevented Ken Pisi from making a tackle on Wallace, but in the first period, when Visser had been body-checked by Ahsee Tuala as he chased his own kick to the Northampton line, the decision after a discussion with the television match official was that it had been a coming together. It was another example of the system yielding confusion, not clarity.
Karl Dickson had very nearly scored from Visser’s chip, acrobatically grounding the ball on the dead-ball line, but otherwise most of the action was fought between the two 22s. The penalty count was 8-3 to Northampton in the first-half, prompting a section of the crowd to let Tempest know what they thought when he walked down the tunnel, and 8-3 to the home side in the second.
Northampton did take advantage of Quins’ poor presentation of the ball at the breakdown, but lacked a spark in attack and could not bring George North into play. They had been out-muscled and while they would not initially have been perturbed at the sight of Jones coming on seven minutes in to replace Mark Lambert, who suffered concussion after mistiming his tackle on Teimana Harrison, on a side of the scrum he was unfamiliar with, the experience was to prove hair-raising.
