London Irish head coach Les Kiss wants his side to continue to make attack part of their DNA after the Exiles stunned Harlequins 22-19 in the London derby.

Reigning Premiership champions Harlequins led 14-10 at the break thanks to tries from Oscar Bear and Luke Northmore, with Agustin Creevy crossing in response for Irish.

But further tries from Rob Simmons and Ben White after the interval ensured the visitors prevailed at the Twickenham Stoop on Saturday despite Beard scoring a second on 66 minutes.

And after watching his team pick up just their second league win of the season, Kiss said he was delighted with the way the Exiles performed in both attack and defence.

“It's a good win, we knew it would come down to our defence and I think what we showed was our connected passion and emotion,” said Kiss.

“We're trying to make our desire to attack part of our DNA, we don't want to shy away, but we knew we had to keep playing our game and make them come to us.

“It's a pretty crucial game for us in terms of where we are, but I thought it was a great derby where both teams really put their effort in.

“We're finding out more about each other as a squad with every game, it's grown week-by-week and step by step we're trying to find out who we are. Hopefully we can take another step next week.”

The defeat for Quins was a disappointing setback as they missed a chance to close the gap on Premiership league leaders Leicester Tigers, who had a bye weekend.

But despite the defending champions suffering their third league defeat of the campaign, they remain in the top three and can now look forward to a busy December.

Harlequins senior coach Tabai Matson said: “It's never one thing, but we'll have a really good look at our kick-offs when we score points as in the first half, we exited really poorly.

“We let them score and get back into the game. We just didn't get the rhythm today that we normally do which was really disappointing.

“A lot of it was just the guys not having played together for a couple of weeks or even longer and at this level of the competition, you only have to be down a couple of percent and you get beat.

“There's a long uninterrupted stretch now of games so hopefully we can start to build that momentum again.”