Saints 'did everything but score' against Munster as Dowson refuses to blame the ref

And the director of rugby refused to lay into referee Pierre-Baptiste Nuchy for his decision not to award a penalty try to Saints during the second half.

James Ramm was taken out off the ball and then in the air by Munster replacement scrum-half Craig Casey, who was yellow carded for the incident.

But following a lengthy review, Nuchy, a late replacement for fellow Frenchman Ludovic Cayre, opted against giving Saints a seven-pointer, which would have cut the deficit to four points with 24 minutes to play.

"The only thing I can compare it to is the Jacob Umaga incident at Wasps (when Umaga was red carded for taking Courtnall Skosan out in the air and a penalty try was given)," Dowson said.

"Sometimes they're given, sometimes they're not - and it wasn't on this occasion.

"I didn't have the ref mic so I didn't hear what they were talking about, and my French is fairly poor anyway.

"It wasn't given and we still had loads of opportunities from that point to score so that's not the be-all and end-all."

Munster were hit by a total of three yellow cards during the second period, but they defended with real defiance throughout, refusing to concede a single try.

In fact, the second half was completely scoreless for both sides as Munster made sure of the victory, leaving Saints bottom of their Heineken Champions Cup pool with zero points.

"I said to the lads after that we did everything but score," Saints boss Dowson said.

"The difference was that they scored their back peel, we didn't score ours.

"They scored from a pick and go, we didn't get that.

"We spoke at half-time about conditions and the way the game was going, and we knew territory was massive to put them under pressure. We did that really well and there were loads of good bits in there, but as frustrating as it is, we just didn't get the ball over the line.

"It was disappointing to miss those opportunities."

Saints had lost 46-12 at La Rochelle eight days earlier, but Dowson felt the Munster showing was a much better performance.

"Massively," he said.

"I thought last week, we had loads of collision, contact and physicality but we didn't have a lot of accuracy, we gave a lot of penalties away, we got out of our system trying to solve stuff.

"This week, for large periods of time we had that physicality and we also had that accuracy in our defensive system.

"In the first half, we probably gave too many penalties away and they converted from those.

"In the second half, we won loads of penalties and didn't convert. That was the story of the game."