A win at Ashton Gate remained elusive for Fraser Dingwall and his Northampton Saints teammates, as the side fell to their sixth straight defeat there with a 41-26 loss in Round 2 of the Gallagher PREM.
Saints had stayed close to their hosts for large parts of the match and found themselves sitting just one point adrift at half-time thanks to a handy brace of scores from George Hendy.
Bristol pulled away again after the break but two tries in four minutes put Northampton straight back in it, when Alex Mitchell and then Josh Kemeny closed the gap to eight points and give Saints hope of a comeback with 13 minutes left on the clock.
It was not to be for Saints though, who were forced to leave Bristol with only a single league point as Bears were awarded a penalty try in the final play of the match after Tommy Freeman’s illegal actions stopped a certain try for Louis Rees-Zammit.
“I’m frustrated, to be honest,” said Saints captain Dingwall.
“I felt like at half-time with it being a one-point game, we hadn’t actually fired that much. We were in a good place to come out and have a good crack at it in the second half but we just never really got going.
“We chased a lot, gave a lot of penalties away, so we put ourselves under a lot of pressure. We’re pretty frustrated.
“We were in the game at half-time because we battled hard and kept them out a few times. I felt like we were in a good place, the energy was good and we felt like we hadn’t played that well yet, but we didn’t start the second half well.
“We gave away field position and penalties and ultimately that cost us because we put ourselves under too much pressure.
“I’m not going to deny that Bristol did some really good stuff, they defended really well, they scrambled hard and they stopped some opportunities when we did break.
“But my frustration, and the things that were in our control, are things like breakdown decisions around whether we compete to give away a penalty. That’s one of the most frustrating things because a poor decision there leads to us defending again, and again we’re under heat.
“It gives us a good marker of where we’re at and we’ve got stuff we can get better at. We’re not a million miles off and it’s never as bad as you think – it’s just a frustrating one.”
Northampton sit in fourth place in the PREM table ahead of Sunday’s match in Round 2 and Dingwall knows that his side must rectify their slow start at Ashton Gate as they prepare to face Bath Rugby, Leicester Tigers and Gloucester Rugby before the end of the month.
Dingwall said: “In that 10 minutes when we scored two tries, I was full of confidence and belief that we were going to go and win that game.
“But things don’t go your way, we made a few bad errors again, Bristol put us under pressure and the game goes away from you.
“We can’t wait until the 60th minute to start throwing some proper shots at teams.
“Fair enough to Bristol because they were good and they battled hard. We’ll take our medicine and we roll into another week.”