As with England, who retained Hartley in their senior squad last week despite the hooker serving the latest in a series of suspensions, the club said they had given serious thought to bringing his four-year run as skipper to an end, but resisted the demotion.
Jim Mallinder, Northampton’s director of rugby, suggested even the best players were liable to “push it too far occasionally” and that Hartley had turned the other cheek in the face of deliberate provocation in big matches often enough to suggest his temperament was not a major problem.
Having lost on their first appearance in the Premiership final last May, when Hartley was sent off for abusing the referee just before half-time, Northampton needed no better evidence of the cost of a lapse in discipline. “We took a lot of time to decide what was the right thing,” said Mallinder. “In big games in front of 80,000 people there is a lot of stress on everyone concerned. What happened shouldn’t have happened but we all make mistakes, we learn and we move on and make sure it doesn’t happen again. It was a hard lesson to learn but I think Dylan will learn that lesson.”
Hartley is being reminded daily of the British Irish Lions tour that he missed through his 11-week ban – it expires on 1 September, six days before Northampton’s first match of the new Premiership season against Exeter. That is because Saints’ seven newcomers include the England prop Alex Corbisiero and Wales wing George North, who were both stars of the victorious Lions trip Down Under.
North was top try-scorer on the tour. If North’s previous team, the Scarlets, had been better placed financially, the 21-year-old might still be playing at home in Wales, but the Pro12′s loss is the Premiership’s, and specifically Northampton’s, gain.
“I haven’t had the chance to win anything with the Scarlets; winning trophies was one of the reasons I was really keen to come here,” said North. “In Wales everyone thinks the Premiership is all about the forwards’ game. But we are aiming to play attacking rugby.”
That goal will be helped by the arrival of former England fly-half Alex King – latterly employed schooling the wondrous back line at Clermont Auvergne – as Saints’ backs coach, and the Samoa scrum-half Kahn Fotuali’i. “On paper we’ve signed some good ones,” said Mallinder, “but only time will tell.”
New-look Saints stick with captain Dylan Hartley
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