By GTD
December 24 2006

Boxing Day brings us a festive visitor this year in the shape of Leicester Tigers. An awesome rugby team in some pretty unforgiving form. The worries of Friday night's trip to Sixways is replaced with a sense of forboding as the Tigers approach. My first job when I look to pen a match preview is find the positives, look for the one stat that will make all of us approach the Madstad on match day with a feeling of 'this can happen'.

Naturally the history is where I turned on this Christmas Eve. First Mistake !! We've won only 3 of the last 19 games against Leicester and not since we did the double on them in 02/03. Admittedly our performances at home have been marginally better than the scraps at Welford Road but still they don't make good reading.

It's the one team that when you look down the fixture list you think : we'd do well to beat them. With no disrespect to any other team in the GP there's just something about Leicester that brings with them a feeling of awe. I'm sure there's a part of Mr Johnson that lives on on the pitch when they take the field.

So at this time of the year when we are all filled with warm feelings I'll finish this brief preview with a few thoughts and quotes that will hopefully send you to the game on Tuesday with positive thoughts and voice aplenty :

The official GP site describe this fixture as "the most attractive of the round 11 fixtures". There's a reason for that - there's an upset on the cards!

Olivier Magne is back from suspension! Steffon has been immense make no mistake but to have them both in the squad can only be a good thing. The levels of experience that the likes of Olivier bring will be unquantifiable against the Tigers.

Nils Mordt could make a start. Despite his young age he is already an Irish stalwart. We've missed his tackling at times recently and I hope he makes an appearance.

To quote Brian Smith following the Worcester win if we show the same levels of "courage and tenacity" as we did against Worcester this is there for us to surprise the travelling Tigers and send them back to their enclosure.

Irish by 1. What better Christmas Present ??