Sleightholme: Saints’ trust in each other inspired comeback at Chiefs

Ollie Sleightholme commended the ‘trust’ that he and his Northampton Saints teammates have in each other after the side came back from 26-0 down to defeat Exeter Chiefs 36-42 at Sandy Park. 

The men in Black, Green and Gold struggled to find a foothold in the match’s early stages and quickly found themselves 26 points adrift after just 25 minutes, but Saints scored five times in the middle third of the match to get themselves back into it, through Callum Braley and George Furbank as well as a hat-trick of scores from Sleightholme. 

To that point, Chiefs had only been able to add an extra three points from Henry Slade’s boot, but a Rusi Tuima try ten minutes from time swung the lead back Exeter’s way until a dramatic overtime score saw Rory Hutchinson cross the whitewash and seal the win for Saints. 

The victory marked Northampton’s seventh in a row across both the Gallagher Premiership and the Investec Champions Cup competitions – as the men in Black, Green and Gold added Exeter’s name to the list of scalps they’ve taken in recent weeks, including the likes of Saracens, Glasgow Warriors, RC Toulon and Sale Sharks.  

And 23-year-old Sleightholme – who claimed the Player-of-the-Match medal for his efforts on Devon – attributed Saints’ ability to overturn the deficit set by Chiefs to the closeness of the squad. 

“We really didn’t start how we wanted to,” Sleightholme said. “Looking at the scoreline halfway through that first half we were all a bit stung, but we knew we just had to get our game back on the pitch, we trust our process and we’re really close as a group. 

“We knew we hadn’t fired any of our shots, we knew we’d been taking a step back on some things and we knew once we turned that around – like we showed in those last eight minutes of the first half and a larger proportion of the second half – we knew we could do it. 

“Obviously their yellow cards did affect the game, but we were just trying to get our game onto the pitch whether there were 14 men or 15 men against us. I don’t think we thought about it too much, we just needed to start firing shots and that’s what we did.

“Coming down to Exeter and getting the win is a big achievement and the way we did it shows just how much trust we have as a group and how we can come back and stay strong as a team as we trust everything we do.”

Sleightholme scored his fourth, fifth and sixth tries of the season at Sandy Park, the third time he has achieved the feat in his senior career after scoring four against both Timisoara Saracens in 2019 and Worcester Warriors in 2021. 

But the winger was quick to credit his Saints teammates for the scores, saying: “They were definitely all team tries, I have to thank the lads for all of them really. But I’m buzzing, we’re all buzzing with the win in general. To come back from 26-0 down, to come back from that shows the real character of the team and how close we are as a group. 

“You can see the trust we all have in each other, the trust we have in the processes in our game, in our defence and our attack. We know that if we do everything how we want to do it, then we’re going to score and we’re going to be able to come from behind and turn the game around.

Prior to Saturday’s clash, Exeter had been without a loss at Sandy Park in 23 matches, a streak that went back to October 2022. But Sleightholme insisted that Saints aren’t focused on statistics or breaking records, nor their position at the top of the Gallagher Premiership table, but rather concentrating on their own performance in each game as is comes.

“We’ve had a few games recently where we’ve come up against a team on a winning streak,” Sleightholme said. “We went away to Glasgow [Warriors] in Europe and they hadn’t lost for something like 18 games at home and we turned them over. It’s just a case of knowing that when we put our game on the pitch, we do our things really well and we can turn teams over. 

“[Being top of the league] is always a good place to be but it means nothing if you’re not there at the end of the season or if you don’t perform in knock-out rugby when it comes to it. Week in, week out, we just need to look at the next week as a new game. Do what we need to do to get that next win and keep moving forward.”

Now Saints’ focus shifts from the Premiership back to European competition, as Aviron Bayonnais come to Northampton for the first time in the Club’s history on Friday (12 January, kick-off: 8pm). 

Sleightholme added: “We’re top of the pile now here [in the Premiership] and we want to transfer that over to Europe. We want to put our game on the European stage.”