NORTHAMPTON director of rugby Phil Dowson praised the decisiveness of his side after they got back to winning ways with a 30-24 victory over Exeter on Saturday.

Fin Smith kicked 15 points as Alex Coles, Chunya Munga and Rory Hutchinson cross for the hosts, who led 30-10 with 20 minutes remaining.

Immanuel Feyi-Waboso’s late double, along with Olly Woodburn’s first-half score and nine points from the boot of Josh Hodge, gave the Chiefs hope of victory but time ran out.

“We talked last week about how we were going to mark our performance on our intent and our energy, our desire to go and be physical and work hard for each other,” Dowson said.

“I thought we sort of did that against Bath but with loads of inaccuracies in our game, and I thought we would bang at it again tonight.

“I think you can see the crew are emotionally invested in what we are trying to do, but we were way more decisive in this game.

“Defensively I thought we were brilliant in terms of when we did get broken we worked hard to get back and make them go through more phases.

“We got a ton of turnovers, which is something we’re sort of looking at, and we dug in, which fundamentally against a side like Exeter is what you have to do.

“We’re working hard. There are a couple of things we obviously need to fix up. There’s a high shot in there, which leads to the yellow card which puts a little bit more pressure on us, but those things are sometimes going to happen as well.”

Fly-half Smith produced an impressive performance which will have no doubt caught the eye of England head coach Steve Borthwick, and Dowson said: “We always talk about his age, but I think he’s somebody who is just growing every week.

“He’s leading in terms of how we attack and how the game goes forward.

“There’s obviously a lot of competition for the England number 10 shirt. I only saw the first half of the Quins game [against Newcastle], with Marcus Smith back in and flying around doing some good stuff.

“It’s a great competition to have for Steve to make those decisions around. And there’s obviously George Ford in that mix as well, but I think Fin is definitely in the conversation.”

Exeter have been blighted by injuries in their backline, but director of rugby Rob Baxter was happy with his side’s display despite a second defeat of the campaign.

“We have thought so much about targeting getting something from away games and playing in a way that gives us the best opportunity to do that,” Baxter said.

“We got large parts of that right and we spent a lot of time in the right areas of the field.

“We are still patchy on our individual error count, but I think collectively as a team we took a step forward today.”

Exeter were frequently penalised at the breakdown, particularly in Northampton’s 22, but Baxter said: “I think for a lot of that we can take responsibility for and some of it is fairly simple, and that’s the frustrating thing.

“We are forcing an awful lot that we should be able to let happen if we were a confident side, but that said, we have taken some pretty big steps forward from last week’s game against Leicester.”