Although the performance was much improved from those seen against Sale, Saracens, and for 40 minutes against Northampton, some old habits did creep in too often for my or a lot of other people’s likings, and as Steve Bates has said it wasn’t vintage by any means. But it’s a start.

With Steve Jones and Tim Visser coming into the backs for Alex Tait and Spencer Davey, and Matt Thompson preferred as the starting hooker, the Falcons gave away early penalties of which Ed Barnes kicked one to give his side the lead, although Jonny Wilkinson equalised within the first ten minutes.

Although overall the Falcons did produce a lot more running rugby last night, too often they still kicked possession away, leading to John Rudd taking a high ball on the left in his own half and the crowd screaming “RUN!!!” Visser had a good chance to score on the right but was pushed into touch.

But we didn’t have to wait as long as last week for the opening try, with the outstanding Adam Balding going over from close range, and Wilkinson’s conversion gave us some breathing space. Bristol overall gave little in attack that wasn’t down to our mistakes, including a few dropped balls, or incompetencies, and so we went into half time leading for the first time this season.

It was one of those nights when I wished the game only lasted 40 minutes, we needed nothing but a win and another 40 minutes meant Bristol would have chances to win. But such desperate times call for special measures, and nothing was more special than a try from the winger who hasn’t scored one in the league for over a year!

A flat move to the left saw our favourite Dutchman feed Rudd who broke over almost on the touchline - the referee looked, and finally raised his hand. Some breathing space at last! Rhino might not score many tries for us, but he may not score another as important as this one in a game we simply dared not lose. The conversion put us 17-3 ahead, and we could relax for a while. It also made Jonny the top points scorer in Premiership history, a remarkable achievement given how many games he’s missed either with England or with injury. Congrats to him.

Jones, who had a decent night at full-back, looked to have gone over by the posts but was pulled back, probably correctly, for the ball being knocked forward. Some thoughts turned to a potential bonus point for us, but also the need to prevent the visitors stealing one. Every point is going to count in this two-team league Bristol and ourselves are likely to find ourselves in this season.

But the Falcons reverted to type for much of the last 20 minutes, booting the ball to David Lemi and others in the Bristol back five and inviting them to come back to us. It was like “OK, we’ve played the way we need to to win, let’s practice how Bates wants us to play now”. Like they haven’t been doing that for long enough.

But it mattered not, the 17-3 win was secured after a nervy and slow last ten minutes during which the Choir amused themselves by letting a steward know (or not, as he didn’t seem to hear us) that the two young girls he was chatting to at the front of the stand were too young for him. :-) Obviously he didn’t see the big yellow letters “Under 16s only”.

We also gave the West Stand a bit of jip for their quietness, although I’m sure they contributed to the superb atmosphere last night. Whether it was the darkness, the importance of the game which everybody understood, or Dowse’s words during the week, we found it last night, and need to do so again for every game. The mood after the game under the West seemed a touch subdued to me, though maybe that was just relief.

Because while last night may not have been perfect, we at least saw that for a lot of the time our players were trying something different, and guess what, it worked. At the end of the day, the league table doesn’t care about how ‘well a team plays’, it only cares about how many points a team scores versus how many its opponents does.

And this morning, the Premiership table shows us in fifth place, eight points ahead of Bristol. Looks nice, ay? http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_union/tables/4776739.stm