Northampton 32-26 Leicester
Frenchman scores two tries off the bench in derby
Northampton have gone all Euro and on Saturday the dividends rolled in. Not for the first time this season Anthony Belleau and Edoardo Todaro, French and Italian, had the run of the place, scoring two and one tries respectively, as Northampton went to the top of the table, albeit temporarily, dispatching their nearest and dearest.
Theirs has been a bitter-sweet opening to the season, squandering huge leads in games one and two, but here they timed their surges to perfection to come away with the win and their third bonus point out of three. Leicester held the lead for large stretches of a match that only really hit its straps in the second half, but by then we had not only tries in a seesawing contest, but the customary argy-bargy. Belleau’s second try, on the hour, clinched it.
“It’s not often French internationals become available, who are willing to leave France, for financial reasons,” said the Northampton director of rugby, Phil Dowson. “The market’s slightly different over there. For somebody who wanted to push his boundaries, not from a financial point of view, but from a rugby-development one, is very refreshing.”
