It took them a while, two hours if you count last week’s home defeat by Wasps, but Northampton cut loose in the second half to move to within a point of the play-offs. A brutal assault on their “hosts” up front after half-time completed the task and was complemented by sweeter-looking tries either side of it, one right at the death to claim the full points. London Irish, though, drift on. The resumption of activity has yet to stimulate them. This was a first match for them at The Stoop, which they will call home until they move to their new pad in Brentford in October. The rest of this season already looks as if it will prove an exercise in keeping time. They barely fired a shot throughout. The first 40 minutes, indeed, was almost without value from either side. Those who are convinced the game has lost its way have been vocal as successive teams have fumbled their way back into the swing of things. And if constantly complaining is your bag, that first half might act as the latest exhibit for the prosecution. The half-time score was 3-3, and we were lucky to get the two penalties. Actually, maybe we were not. There were 16 penalties dished out in that first half alone. The miracle is that only two of them were converted into points. Irish equalised James Grayson’s earlier penalty, when Paddy Jackson took the points on the stroke of half-time, after their attempt to drive an attacking line-out was thwarted. Irish’s limitations up front would be exposed in the second half, but here was an early hint. When they looked elsewhere for chinks in the Saints’ defence, Shaun Adendorff handled in one of the subsequent rucks, allowing Jackson to equalise, after Jack Cooke had earlier gone off his feet at a ruck for Grayson’s penalty. It is the ruck, as ever, that is causing so much of the trouble, the referees’ latest attempts to reinforce existing laws confusing the players even more than normal - or at least exposing their susceptibility to the laws of physics. All the evidence we have from history suggests that the excitability of the officials will wane after a few rounds, and normal service will be resumed. The penalties kept coming in the second half, but by then the flow was almost entirely in Northampton’s favour and the area of offence shifted towards the age-old problems for a side defending those driven line-outs. Once again, Irish were the ones confounded and were forced into conceding a penalty try, with a yellow card for Sekope Kepu, on the hour. Then the accent shifted to those problems of the undermanned scrum with the laws of physics. Time and again, and despite multiple lectures, the Exiles’ scrum was forced backwards and into infringements, so they lost yet another of their number to a yellow card (Will Goodrick-Clarke), and more ground to those laws of physics. Penalty try number two duly followed. And so Irish’s resistance, such as it was, had been broken, but they did supply the one good bit of the first half, when Ollie Hassell-Collins was released down the left, only to miss Ben Meehan with an inside ball for a likely try. The bruising youngster on the left wing was involved again in the second half with another fine run, but by then Northampton had shown themselves superior even at that running game. Their first try, 10 minutes into the second half, was scored by Tom Collins, released by some lovely handling. His chip and gather confounded the Irish cover defence, before the Saints moved on to testing the Exiles with those meatier exchanges up front. But the garnish came at the death with that bonus-point try, spectacularly finished by Ahsee Tuala. Another dour game had been salvaged - as has Northampton’s season.