Dan Evans scores twice as Ospreys hold off Saints in Champions Cup thriller

If Northampton were in a hole before this defeat – as their captain and chairman had both claimed – with 20 minutes to go they had dug their own graves. A remarkable late flurry of tries restored respectability to the scoreline but the Saints are now effectively out of Europe, their losing run continues and Jim Mallinder’s position is on increasingly shaky ground.

With more than an hour gone the Ospreys led by 30 points. Northampton looked desperate in almost every department but they then proceeded to score four tries in the space of eight minutes. The last of them was scored by Harry Mallinder, but after one of numerous late fights broke out immediately afterwards, he was shown a yellow card. The conversion, taken by Cobus Reinach, was missed and that left Northampton 11 points adrift. It was the end of the scoring but not the drama. The referee Alexandre Ruiz showed a red card to Hanno Dirksen for a high hit on Juan Pablo Estelles, the last word in a heated match that boiled over again, having barely simmered for an hour.

It still goes down as a defeat for Northampton on the ledger, however, and a third in the competition, with 124 points conceded along the way. It also in effect ends their hopes of reaching the knockout stages. In all competitions they have won just once in 10 matches since September – the kind of form that will only pile the pressure on Mallinder.

“The team are not playing with any confidence,” he said. “We’ve shown in periods this season that we’re a good side but we conceded too many tries, we’ve done that throughout the season. We’ve got to start winning games and playing better. We need that confidence and we need that quickly. It’s a tough game to be involved in when you’re losing.”

There were mitigating factors, chiefly the loss to injury of both the fly-half Piers Francis and his replacement Stephen Myler inside the first quarter, but Northampton were deeply unimpressive in the first half and their inability to trouble the Ospreys when the visiting winger Jeff Hassler was in the sin-bin for a high tackle is cause for concern indeed.

Hassler was still off the field when the Ospreys, themselves on a poor run of domestic form, scored the opening try, Dan Evans celebrating his 100th appearance with a score that owed as much to the Welsh side’s scrum dominance as it did the swift hands of the classy Sam Davies.

The visitors, having tightened up their discipline, were motoring and their second try was again thanks to sleight of hand, this time from the outside-centre, Kieron Fonotia, who freed Hassler on the left. He outpaced David Ribbans and found Tom Habberfield inside to cruise in under the posts. Davies converted for the second time for a commanding 17-3 lead.

If the boos that greeted the half-time whistle were a demonstration of dissatisfaction, it was disbelief that greeted Alun Wyn Jones running in from nearly halfway, only for Ruiz to go upstairs and learn that Davies was offside in the buildup.

But by the 47th minute, the Ospreys had their third score – Hassler this time finishing off the most routine of tries down the left, where Northampton were badly exposed numerically after losing possession in midfield. An already sparse crowd thinned considerably.

The Ospreys had their bonus point when Evans burst through a gaping hole and fed Davies, who found Fonotia to go over in the left corner and while Dylan Hartley responded with a pushover try, Evans and Hassler both soon added their second scores of the match.

Cue Northampton’s fightback. First Nic Groom finished off well in the right-hand corner, then Rob Horne from close range, soon followed by Ahsee Tuala and then Mallinder. Things were heating up, tempers were flaring and Ruiz showed yellow cards to Mallinder and the Ospreys replacement Rob McCusker, and a red to Dirksen as the Ospreys stumbled over the line.

They did so without Rhys Webb, Justin Tipuric and Dan Biggar and they remain in the hunt for the knockout stages, after collecting losing bonus points in their previous two matches.

“In the first 60 we were pretty special, I thought we controlled the game and we thought it was dead and buried and we got a bit loose,” said the Ospreys head coach, Steve Tandy. “Physically we really dominated the first hour but they got a bit of momentum and it all got a bit crazy.”