By Whaley Shark
March 2 2015

Well I did make it down to Leicester on Saturday as threatened, then ‘stuff’ got in the way and have only just got round to writing it up. You all know the score so I don’t see any point in blow by blow, but there are a few things which it’s still worth saying.

The first is that we really didn’t look like the same team which had fronted up to Saracens so well the previous weekend. We lost our very first scrum against the head and conceded a penalty in keeping Tigers out. Nick Macleod evened the scores from half way a few minutes later with a fine kick on a gusty day. Tigers’ first try came from a defensive error on our 22, which let them build pressure and eventually force their way over for a try, awarded after consulting the TMO. Another penalty took the score to 13-3 with 15 minutes gone, and the game seemed to going away from us alarmingly quickly.

We then went down to 14 men for ten minutes thanks to Tom Arscott’s deliberate knock-on, and no sooner was he back on than a Matt Tait break gave the Tigers a strong attacking position. After the TMO denied them twice, and Magnus Lund was binned, Sir had seen enough and awarded Tigers a penalty try. We did have a bit of a flurry just before half time, but the opportunity was lost as we were penalised, and that was that for the first half.

We finally strung some sustained possession together in the first few minutes of the second half. We tried our penalty to touch and rolling maul thing, but Tigers were well able to cope with that. However, we won a 5 metre scrum, and shifted the ball quickly to Tom Arscott, who just made it over in the right corner. We then set up another attack, which petered out with a knock-on as we got over-excited. Tigers won a scrum penalty on the hour, and then we had a glimmer of hope. A Tigers’ player kicked the ball dead from inside his own 22 and we suddenly had a scrum 15 metres out. Tigers were penalised and we went for the scrum again. Tigers turned us over, cleared to touch and then stole our lineout- opportunity gone!

As the clock ran down, we had a few more flurries, but didn’t have the accuracy to finish and the last score of the game came with 90 seconds to go, with Tigers’ centre Bai blasting over from a five metre scrum. Sniffing a four try bonus point, Tigers ran the restart from deep in their own 22 but, though they reached our 22, they knocked on to end the match.

Looking back, I guess we were on the back foot from very early in the game, and we didn’t look as precise and organised as we have in the past, so Tigers seemed to get through our usually robust defence too easily for comfort. They were also more than a match for us in both scrum and lineout and that really prevented us building any sort of platform. Add in a sense of chasing the game for an hour, leading to imprecision in handling, and it’s perhaps not surprising that we were unable to exploit the relatively few opportunities we had. Definitely second best on the day, then. Hey ho- on to Bath.