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Saracens beaten by last-gasp Paddy Jackson penalty for Irish

By PA
(Photo by Andrew Redington/Getty Images)

A last-minute penalty from Paddy Jackson was enough for London Irish to snatch a late victory in a thrilling Gallagher Premiership encounter as they toppled second-placed Saracens 32-30 at Brentford. In a lightning-quick start, Benhard van Rensburg was left all alone on the left touchline and crossed over in the corner after taking a long pass from Curtis Rona to give the hosts the lead inside the opening two minutes.

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Jackson was unable to convert and the lead remained at five, with a penalty from Alex Lozowski soon after bringing the gap down to just two. Just past the midway point of the half, the hosts were on the board once more, Rona again providing the assist by feeding van Rensburg to cross over in the right-hand corner untouched for his second score, with Jackson this time adding the extras to give them a 12-3 lead.

The rest of the half passed without much incident until Tom Woolstencroft bundled over from the back of a driving maul following a lineout, with Lozowski adding the extras to cut the lead back to just two at the break.

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The second half was off to a quick start again for the hosts. Less than a minute in, Adam Coleman perfectly read and charged down Ruben de Haas’ box kick before scooping the ball over and touching down himself, with Jackson’s extras putting the home side’s lead back to nine points.

When Sean O’Brien was sin-binned soon after for straying offside, Lozowski slotted over the resulting penalty and Saracens were presented the perfect opportunity to get back into the game. But it was the home side that got the next points though as a collapsed scrum gave Jackson the opportunity to slot through a penalty from just inside his own half to push their lead back to nine.

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Saracens eventually made their advantage count though with Rotimi Segun sprinting into the corner from 22 metres out after the ball had been spun through the backs, while Lozowski got some luck with his conversion as it bounced off the post and over to cut the Irish lead back to just two. Irish hit back with a bonus-point try straight away as Ollie Hassell-Collins touched down in the corner just as the sin bin expired after some quick passing from the backs, with Jackson on target with the conversion.

A penalty from Lozowski with less than seven minutes to play cut the lead to six and set the stage for a nail-biting finish, with the tension only increasing when Coleman was sent off for a high tackle on Alex Lewington with five minutes remaining.

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A try in the corner from Nick Tompkins at the back of a rolling maul cut the lead, with Lozowski keeping his cool to put the visitors ahead for the first time in the game with three minutes remaining. 

Irish made one last push to grab the victory and a penalty for offside against Saracens – right in front of the posts in the dying seconds – was slotted over with ease by Jackson to take the points and move the hosts up three places to fifth in the table.

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1 Comment
J
Jim 1032 days ago

PADDY Jackson best Irish 10 around

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J
JW 26 minutes ago
‘The problem with this year’s Champions Cup? Too many English clubs’

Like I've said before about your idea (actually it might have been something to do with mine, I can't remember), I like that teams will a small sustainable league focus can gain the reward of more consistent CC involvement. I'd really like the most consistent option available.


Thing is, I think rugby can do better than footballs version. I think for instance I wanted everyone in it to think they can win it, where you're talking about the worst teams not giving up because they are so far off the pace we get really bad scoreline when that and giving up to concentrate on the league is happening together.


So I really like that you could have a way to remedy that, but personally I would want my model to not need that crutch. Some of this is the same problem that football has. I really like the landscape in both the URC and Prem, but Ireland with Leinster specifically, and France, are a problem IMO. In football this has turned CL pool stages in to simply cash cow fixtures for the also ran countries teams who just want to have a Real Madrid or ManC to lose to in their pool for that bumper revenue hit. It's always been a comp that had suffered for real interest until the knockouts as well (they might have changed it in recent years?).


You've got some great principles but I'm not sure it's going to deliver on that hard hitting impact right from the start without the best teams playing in it. I think you might need to think about the most minimal requirement/way/performance, a team needs to execute to stay in the Champions Cup as I was having some thougt about that earlier and had some theory I can't remember. First they could get entry by being a losing quarter finalist in the challenge, then putting all their eggs in the Champions pool play bucket in order to never finish last in their pool, all the while showing the same indifference to their league some show to EPCR rugby now, just to remain in champions. You extrapolate that out and is there ever likely to be more change to the champions cup that the bottom four sides rotate out each year for the 4 challenge teams? Are the leagues ever likely to have the sort of 'flux' required to see some variation? Even a good one like Englands.


I'd love to have a table at hand were you can see all the outcomes, and know how likely any of your top 12 teams are going break into Champions rubyg on th back it it are?

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f
fl 3 hours ago
‘The problem with this year’s Champions Cup? Too many English clubs’

"Right, so even if they were the 4 worst teams in Champions Cup, you'd still have them back by default?"

I think (i) this would literally never happen, (ii) it technically couldn't quite happen, given at least 1 team would qualify via the challenge cup, so if the actual worst team in the CC qualified it would have to be because they did really well after being knocked down to the challenge cup.

But the 13th-15th teams could qualify and to be fair I didn't think about this as a possibility. I don't think a team should be able to qualify via the Champions Cup if they finish last in their group.


Overall though I like my idea best because my thinking is, each league should get a few qualification spots, and then the rest of the spots should go to the next best teams who have proven an ability to be competitive in the champions cup. The elite French clubs generally make up the bulk of the semi-final spots, but that doesn't (necessarily) mean that the 5th-8th best French clubs would be competitive in a slimmed down champions cup. The CC is always going to be really great competition from the semis onwards, but the issue is that there are some pretty poor showings in the earlier rounds. Reducing the number of teams would help a little bit, but we could improve things further by (i) ensuring that the on-paper "worst" teams in the competition have a track record of performing well in the CC, and (ii) by incentivising teams to prioritise the competition. Teams that have a chance to win the whole thing will always be incentivised to do that, but my system would incentivise teams with no chance of making the final to at least try to win a few group stage matches.


"I'm afraid to say"

Its christmas time; there's no need to be afraid!

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