Declan Kidney London Irish

Piet van Zyl crossed twice with Max Northcote-Green and Tom Fowlie also grabbing tries in what was only Irish’s third league win of the season.

It was, though, their second bonus-point success against rivals Harlequins, and cut the gap to second-bottom Worcester Warriors to nine points despite their impressive home win against Newcastle Falcons.

With three games remaining – starting with a huge test against champions Exeter Chiefs at Madejski Stadium on Sunday (3pm) – Kidney acknowledged Irish have set a standard they must maintain.

He confessed: “We need to produce those performances on a consistent basis now – we always said that we would control the controllable.

“What happens elsewhere is out of our control and congratulations to Worcester for getting the win at home to Newcastle.

“As long as it’s mathematically possible we’ll just keep fighting and take the confidence from this win.”

He continued: “The boys were working extremely hard before Les and I arrived at the club and against Harlequins a few passes stuck, and we now have a massive task against Exeter, which we’re all looking forward to.

“I’m delighted for the boys because when you put in a lot of hard work and don’t win, doubts can creep in.

“Hopefully we’ve banished a few of those today and we can move on.”

Irish had shown signs of improvement in their 33-29 defeat to Gloucester prior to beating Quins, and Kidney said confidence is growing.

He said: “We started the Gloucester game well two weeks ago, but today we managed to sustain better game management.

“Confidence is a strange thing as you can have too much of it and you can become a little bit loose. We’ll build on this win and take things from there.”

Meanwhile, the outstanding van Zyl added: “We’re a good team and it was a massive team effort against Quins.

“Declan and Les have come in and made it clear that we need to take things game by game as it’s out of our hands.

“We’ll keep on improving and look to build on the win against Exeter this Sunday.”