The Bristol Bears gaffe that 'calmed' Mark McCall down

Saracens director of rugby Mark McCall was elated with his side’s performance as they kept alive their hopes of an end of season play-off spot with a 41-26 win over Bristol in a thrilling game at Ashton Gate.

Saracens built up a 34-21 half-time lead as they exposed a leaky Bristol defence and despite losing forwards Theo McFarland and Maro Itoje to late yellow cards they held off a sustained second-half rally from Bears, who gave themselves too much ground to make up.

The bonus-point win for Saracens reduced the gap between themselves and Exeter and Bristol to just two and one point respectively and with two home games from their three remaining matches, they will fancy their chances of overhauling them.

Saracens’ tries came from Tom Willis, Hugh Tizard, Rotimi Segun, Ben Earl, Tobias Elliott and Fergus Burke, who added a penalty and three conversions. Owen Farrell kicked a conversion.

Fitz Harding, Harry Thacker, Matias Moroni and Kalaveti Ravouvou scored Bristol’s tries with Tom Jordan converting three.

McCall said: “In the first half we were great with the ball in attack and very confrontational but we handed them a couple of gifts and so it was frustrating that the half-time score wasn’t as wide as it should have been.

“After the interval I’m proud of how we looked like a team that it mattered to as we showed huge grit in defence to tough it out, especially when we were down to 14 for a decent period of time.

“It was a nerve-wracking ending but fortunately they missed a crucial conversion at a vital stage which calmed me down as we’ve lost three games at home this season in the last five minutes.”

McCall paid tribute to fly-half Fergus Burke who contributed 14 of Saracens’ points.

McCall said: “Fergus was brilliant for the 50 minutes that he was on there and he’s certainly a player to watch as he is going places.”

Bristol director of rugby Pat Lam bemoaned his side’s poor defensive effort as Bears fell to their 10th consecutive defeat at the hands of Saracens.

He said: “It’s always a good game against Saracens and it always comes down to little moments but one of the areas that we pride ourselves on is our line-out defence but they broke through it three times today.

“People were in the wrong positions and we didn’t stay connected but we showed the boys some clips at half-time and to their credit they fixed it in the second half as we didn’t concede again until the 79th minute. It’s frustrating that they didn’t do that in the first half.

“We lost a few line-outs and didn’t look after the ruck when quick penalties were taken so being two scores behind at half-time instead of one left us too much to do.”