Man of the match Furbank enjoyed steering the Saints ship against Harlequins

George Furbank produced an all-action performance (photo by David Rogers/Getty Images)

And he thanked centres Fraser Dingwall and Tommy Freeman for making his life easier in the 36-33 win against Harlequins.

Furbank stepped in for Fin Smith at 10, with Saints' regular fly-half having suffered back spasms at Leicester Tigers six days earlier.

And Furbank went on to produce a man of the match performance as Quins were beaten in an exciting Gallagher Premiership encounter at cinch Stadium at Franklin's Gardens.

"I do enjoy going there (to fly-half)," Furbank said.

"To be honest, most of the time I get 10 minutes there when Fin starts cramping at the end of games so it was pretty enjoyable managing it from the start.

"The boys on the outside helped me massively today, with Dingers and Freemo always the voices and the eyes."

It was an ebb and flow game at the Gardens, with both sides showing their attacking ability.

Saints were 21-12 up at half-time and 36-26 ahead late on, but Quins kept battling and left the Gardens with a try bonus point and a losing bonus point.

"We spoke at half-time about not making it a back and forth game, and that's exactly what we ended up doing," Furbank said.

"It was a bit frustrating but we trusted our defence on the whole. It was frustrating to concede as many points as we did, but we dug ourselves out of a few holes.

"But our attack clicked and allowed us to score some points of our own.

"Radders (defence coach Lee Radford) has brought massive energy to our defence and boys are excited about it, which you can see from our hits and our celebrations and our sets. It's what we want to bring.

"We're pretty frustrated with them scoring so many points, but it always seems to be the way against Quins.

"We seem to have a lot of Friday night games against them here and it always seems to be very high scoring.

"Both teams have a lot of attacking nous and ability so sometimes there's not much you can do."

Saints' bonus-point success moved them level with Quins in the league table.

And Furbank said: "We didn't want to go two losses on the bounce so to bounce back from the derby-day loss was massive for us and it helps us climb that table a little bit."