Positives and negatives for Saints boss Dowson after defeat at Bath

But the director of rugby admitted his side didn't get things right 'from a technical and tactical point of view'.

Saints were made to pay for the concession of plenty of penalties and some porous first-half defending as they were beaten in the Gallagher Premiership curtain raiser at The Rec.

But they did seem to have some control of the game at the start of the second half, pulling back to five points behind before Bath landed a sucker punch with an Ollie Lawrence score.

After that, the home side eased to victory, but Dowson felt there were plenty of positives to take from the match.

"In the first half, we didn't quite get our kicking strategy right and it put us under a huge amount of pressure because we didn't spend any time putting them under any heat in their half." the Saints boss said.

"But in the first 20 minutes of the second half, we played really well, put them under tonnes of pressure, gave ourselves opportunities. We maybe didn't take those opportunities but at 21-16 down after 62 minutes, I felt really confident, but then the game got away from us.

"Clearly discipline was an issue and looking after the ball, so there's loads to work with.

"We said we were going to measure ourselves on our physicality and our energy, and I thought that was outstanding and we can do a lot with that."

Dowson added: "It's very easy to look at the past but actually, winning away from home is tough and you've got to get things right.

"We didn't get things right today and we got punished.

"We probably chased the game a bit in the last 20 minutes and made some uncharacteristic errors that allowed them in, but on the whole I thought there was loads of effort but we weren't quite where we needed to be from a technical and tactical point of view.

"A lot of the things we spoke about in terms of what we really wanted to go after, like their set piece, our defensive collisions, our work was great.

"We can coach around the discipline issues we need to be better at, we can coach around some of the things that came unstuck tonight and we'll be better next week."