Northampton Saints boss Phil Dowson denied rugby has gone soft after his side and Bath served up 18 tries in another Prem points fest.
The 119 points, with Saints winning 71-48, was the second highest in the league’s history and the latest in a series of high tallies recently.
Northampton beat Bristol Bears 94-33 in May, the Prem’s biggest aggregate.
The trend has been for attack to dominate defence in recent games the world over.
Good rugby
But director of rugby Dowson said: “I know people will say it is too easy to score, but you’re not going to please everybody.
“We don’t want it to be 99-88. It’s not basketball, but we also don’t want a 9-3.
“I used to have a coach called Mike Friday and one of his sayings was that ‘you can’t defend good rugby’ and there’s lots of good rugby being played.
“I have no doubt there will be some games this season that will be tough, ugly, horrible and nasty.
“But I also think we want to be able to enjoy and reward great rugby.
“And by the way, basketball is selling loads of tickets to sold out arenas.”
The wings were on fire for Northampton with Ollie Sleightholme scoring a hat-trick and Tommy Freeman grabbing two among Saints’ 11 tries.
And Dowson was purring with Sleightholme’s treble that showed he’s back in business after hamstring trouble meant he missed the end of last season.
He added: “He looked pretty sharp.
“He’s been unlucky but he’s put a run of games together, and probably more importantly, a run of training together.
“I thought he looked brilliant – strong and fast.”
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Mistakes
Johann van Graan reckons his side were their own worst enemies as they crashed to their first defeat of the Prem season.
Yellow cards to Josh Bayliss and Ollie Lawrence gave Saints a leg-up in the game as the champions bounced back from defeat at Bristol last week.
But head of rugby van Graan said: “One of the themes of the game was we gave them a few tries with our mistakes.
“We gave them quite a few ins and across the 80 minutes we conceded two yellow cards which were costly.
“Once you try and play catch-up against Saints with 14 men, you are in trouble.
“We are very happy to score 48 points away from home and not happy to concede 71. We have got to be better defensively.
“They punished us for our mistakes and they got the better of us today. We came here to win and we fell short.”
Bath and Northampton have now scored 344 points between them in their last four encounters, including last year’s Champions Cup quarter-final.
Leicester Tigers edged another high-scoring affair on Friday, 38-31, against Gloucester, while Saracens also earned a try bonus in their 30-7 win against Bristol yesterday.
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