Bristol counters, Quirke's return and all-action Dan

Pat Lam knew which was his pick of Bristol's eight tries.

"Kalaveti Ravouvou's is probably my favourite because the boys defended 40 phases," said the Bears coach after a 54-24 success over Leicester racked up a record 10th straight away Premiership win .

"We turned it over and went 90 metres and scored at the other end, which sums up what we do in training."

Practice makes perfect. Bristol are lethal off freshly turned-over ball.

Half their tries - Gabriel Oghre's first, Rich Lane's coast-to-coast beauty, Benhard Janse van Rensburg's charge-down and Ravouvou's searing burst - came within two phases of Leicester coughing up the pill.

The Bears counter as slickly as Floyd Mayweather in his prime, striking fast and from distance. And their broken-field mastery is coming together into some impressive form - they are level on points with Bath at the top of the table.

Friday night's meeting with Sale will be their first home league match since beating Northampton at the end of October.

Ashton Gate - averaging north of 18,000 for Bristol matches for the past two seasons - can expect another bumper crowd for the league's great entertainers.

Oghre has been pushing hard for Test recognition, appearing in England A's win over Australia in the autumn, but Theo Dan remains in front in the England pecking order.

The Saracens hooker started ahead of his international skipper Jamie George against Northampton and carried with energy and spite in his 50 minutes on the StoneX Stadium's flat, all-weather track.

Dan made 51 metres, getting over the gainline from nine of his 11 carries, and scored one of four first-half tries that put the physical hosts out of Saints' sights on the way to a 39-24 win.

Naming players from the same club as the only hookers in England's initial EPS contract group was perhaps surprising, but George himself benefitted from a stacked Saracens dressing room, learning from South Africa's John Smith and Schalk Brits as a youngster.

Northampton won all three meetings with Saracens last season, including the Premiership semi-final, but their title defence is already wobbling.

They are 10 points and four places off the play-off spots. In a 10-team regular season, if you fall behind you have little time to make up ground. It may already be too late for Phil Dowson's men.

Gloucester are one of the Premiership teams that sew a national flag on the back of the collar for their internationals.

There were five Welsh dragons on display among the Cherry and Whites starting XV in the 14-0 victory over Harlequins.

Freddie Thomas, Tomos Williams, Gareth Anscombe, Josh Hathaway and Max Llewellyn were at the forefront of a third straight Premiership win, combining well and often.

Anscombe's yawning mis-pass put Hathaway in for the first home try. Williams and Thomas made yards, only for Christian Wade to be held up over the line, before a full-pelt Hathaway came agonisingly close to gathering Williams' smart counter-kick.

They were also part of a superb defensive effort inflicting on the visitors a first scoreboard shut-out since 2014. It was the high point of the season for defence coach Dominic Waldouck.

Gloucester were horribly leaky in the early part of the season, conceding an average of 38 points per game across the first five rounds. However, they have given up only 24 points in total on their current three-game winning streak.

If you are a Wales fan in search of a free-running, tough-to-beat team in red, Kingsholm has you covered.

Raffi Quirke revealed recently that every autumn his phone's flashback feature throws up images from 2021, when he scampered in for England's final try in a dramatic win over world champions South Africa at Twickenham.

Relentlessly physical, snappy with his distribution and with a sharp eye for a fringe gap, he seemed the coming man then. Instead, he has largely gone missing since.

A rotten run of injuries - the latest being surgery on a wrist - and the emergence of Scotland's Gus Warr have kept him in the shadows at Sale for most of the past three years.

The 28-10 victory against Exeter was only his second Premiership start of 2024.

He came through his 50 minutes fit and healthy, despite a hefty early hit from Ethan Roots, and helped set up Luke James' opening try with subtle dummy, dart and give to Ben Curry.

England coach Steve Borthwick is a big Quirke fan, naming him among a group of players who would have come into consideration for the recent autumn internationals but for injury. Considering Quirke's most recent England appearance was that win over South Africa three years ago, it was some show of faith.

Alex Mitchell is just back from his own injury and neither Ben Spencer nor Jack van Poortvliet made the England role their own in the Northampton man's absence.

Quirke, still only 23, could re-enter the conversation if he stays off the treatment table.

Ashley, Bert, Conall, Darragh. Not a normal-people-meets-Sesame-Street fever dream, but the named storms of this year in the UK.

So far, the Premiership has dodged them. This weekend, though, featured some horrendous conditions.

The boot was a potent, if unpredictable, attacking weapon.

Newcastle scored against Bath via Sam Stuart's hoof before the league leaders replied with Cameron Redpath and Will Muir's tiki-taka opening the way for Tom de Glanville.

Fergus Burke and Ivan van Zyl took to the skies for Saracens with success, while George Ford sent up some monsters into the Salford squall to put Exeter on the back foot.

From the tee, it was trickier. Newcastle's Brett Connon saw the ball blown over, external and his chance of a conversion gone.