'Dream come true' for Furbank after skippering Saints for the first time

Furbank was handed the captaincy after Dan Biggar was forced to withdraw on the morning of the game against London Irish due to illness.

Saints went on to win the match 38-22, bagging a bonus point in the process.

And Furbank, who scored the try that made sure of the maximum haul, looked back with real pride on what was a special day for him.

"I was incredibly proud," Furbank said.

"Dows (Saints boss Phil Dowson) called me in the morning and said that Biggs wasn't going to make it. He asked me to be skipps and I had goosebumps after the phone call.

"It's a dream come true really.

"To play for Saints in the first place and then to lead the boys out - it's a massively proud moment."

So how did Furbank find captaincy?

“Half of the time it didn’t feel like I was captain because I was so far away from the referee," he said.

“We’re a reasonably young group but we’ve got a lot of leaders coming through and a lot of those boys are taking up responsibilities when the likes of Courts, Luds, Biggs and Dingers aren’t playing.

“We have boys who are very happy to step up to that role and they made my life very easy.

“You don’t want too many voices, but people – like Matty Proctor especially – lead from the front by their actions. Those boys just allow you to keep calm heads and make the decisions you need to make.”

Saints made hard work of it at times on Saturday afternoon, struggling to score when London Irish were reduced to 12 men due to three quickfire sin-binnings.

But they kept pushing forward and eventually their rewards came.

Furbank said: “(Irish) had two serious injuries in that first half, which was unfortunate for those guys and that first half was then around 60 minutes long.

“It kind of felt like we couldn’t get our tempo into the game and the sort of way that we like to play.

“It was frustrating and then we couldn’t take our opportunities when they were down to 12 men with three yellow cards, we started the second half pretty poorly too but eventually we fixed those wrongs and started to put our game out there a bit more.

“There were definitely some really frustrating moments in that game, but we also played some smart rugby down in their half and eventually capitalised.

“We’re putting the right things on the field, we think we’re doing some bits well and we’re getting ourselves into good positions. But then there’s a missed final pass or some little bits of miscommunication causing us a few mess-ups that we need to fix.

“That's something we’ll look to put right in training and obviously we’ve got a big week next week, with the derby (against Leicester Tigers at the Gardens), so we need to get those right.”

Furbank, who was on England's summer tour of Australia, came off the bench last weekend, setting up three tries in the 29-22 defeat at Sale Sharks.

But he was back in from the off against Irish.

“Personally, I’m feeling good," said the 25-year-old.

"I didn’t have too much of a pre-season but sometimes that’s quite useful.

"I’m feeling good and I’m raring to go, especially with Leicester Tigers and derby day coming.

“It doesn’t get a lot bigger than that. And we’ve got a few wrongs to put right after that semi-final last season. But we’ve taken our learnings from that game, we’ve put that result to bed.

“We’ll have our own game plan of how we’re going to do things next week and if we can execute that game plan, we fully back ourselves to front up.”