Phil Dowson confirms worst fears over 'frustrating' Alex Mitchell injury

Northampton Saints’ bid to lift the Gallagher PREM title next month has been hit with the news that England and Lions scrum-half Alex Mitchell is set to miss the rest of the season with a hamstring injury.

Mitchell suffered his latest injury last week during an England alignment camp, and it comes less than three months after he picked up a similar problem during the Six Nations defeat to Ireland in February.

He made five appearances for Saints after returning to fitness, and Saints director of rugby Phil Dowson admits that the scans of the injury aren’t looking good for Mitchell to play again this season.

“He’s pulled it, and he’s done a decent job on it. Matt Lee (Saints head of medical) sent me the picture, so it’s going to be a push to get him any rugby for us for the rest of the season. It is frustrating,” said Dowson.

“And every DoR would say that. Steve (Borthwick) would say that. Steve would say that when people get injured on club time, they’re about to go and play in internationals. It’s the nature of the beast.

“These things happen. My question would be, what can we learn from it, and how can we make sure we mitigate the risks of it happening again.”

Dowson has said that the Saints’ medical staff are already looking into the reasons why Mitchell has now damaged both hamstrings in such a short space of time.

“I think it’s definitely a question that we need to investigate further. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily a worry as yet, but you’ve got to make sure this doesn’t become a pattern.

“We will look at ourselves first and how we’re training and how he’s training and bits and pieces to make sure that we’re giving him the best chance. So yeah, I think there’s definitely an investigation going on into what we can do better as well.

“I think we’ve got to make sure we don’t go looking for shadows. But at the same time, we’ve got to make sure that we don’t just gloss it over and say it’s one of those things,” he added.

Questions have been asked about why England needed to hold an alignment camp so close to the end of the season, and why they didn’t let players have a break, as many of their clubmates did.

“That’s something that I think we need to discuss as a group of directors. It would be good to have some conversations around that. But also with England, and, say, how do we mitigate the risk?

“What does the training look like? Did he get the training that he wanted? Where are the metrics? I don’t think it was a ludicrous session in terms of volume.

“I think we’ve got to be careful of saying this session was hard or this session wasn’t hard. It’s unfortunate, and maybe there are things we can do better, but I’m not gonna start casting aspersions until I’ve spoken to Phil Morrow and the rest of their medical team.”