My brother and none of the boys at my school ever seemed to play or talk about it, in fact the closest I had come to a rugby shirt was a girl in my year wearing an england shirt to a school disco. Of course I had heard of Will Carling but who hadn't! I think I had heard of Quins and Bath but certainly never Leicester or any of the others.

So I ended up going to Leicester University in 1996, and in the very first day there I made friends with a Welsh boyo who loved his rugby, and we walked around the sports fair together and he signed up for the university rugby club. And so began the influx of rugby...

The main reason for me getting into rugby however was my boyfriend who I met in the first week of uni, he is from Leicestershire and had been a season ticket holder at the local rugby club, some team called Tigers, who I'd never heard of but apparently had some really good players who I also had never heard of.

He didn't go to the games after he joined university but did play for the hall rugby team and watched the internationals, so obviously that was how I started to become accustomed to the weird sport that is egg-chasing. I had no idea what any of the rules were and still don't really and I didn't really enjoy watching it all that much. But being the dutiful girlfriend I would go to watch him play.

So after the first two years at university I still had never been to a Tigers game, I was completely unaware of their league position, the fact they had been to and lost the european cup final in Cardiff...absolutely oblivious.

Then in 1998 we moved closer to the university, next to the boat, we still didn't go to any games or even think about it until Mike received a mailshot from Tigers (afterall he had been a STH a few years back). It said they were playing Fiji in November (I think) and we decided to go, see those things do work!

I can't really remember too much about the game except that I could hardly see over the other side which could have been due to my need for glasses but also because it was really foggy. I had no idea what was going on, two names do stick in the mind though Geordan Murphy - because he was kicking I think and Neil Back, I had never heard of anyone called Back before!

Anyway we lost that game, but it didn't put me off from going again. We went to quite a few of the home league games in the second half of the season and I was starting to get the hang of it by the end and obviously getting fairly addicted, although I can't really remember any of those games at all, apart from the West Hartlepool one.

Anyway we decided to get a season ticket for the next year. We went to all the games we could make, i.e. during term-time and were getting really into it, however you know you are truely addicted when you wake up in the morning and think about Tigers within ten minutes of opening your eyes. I got to that state at about spring 2000, and it just so happened that there was about a five week gap till the next home game, what were we to do!

We couldn't go five whole weeks without going so I suggested that we go to an away game, Mike had never been to an away game before either. So we ended up phoning John Griffths and going to the London Irish cup game with the LTASC. Hardly a great start as it was the game in which they beat us 47-7, I still remember the chants of we want 50! And choruses of Fields of Athenry which I had never heard before that day.

That was when the addiction really set in, we started going to more and more away games and now don't miss any if we can help it. Although now it involves us travelling miles no matter where the games are as we moved away from Leicester in autumn 2000, the things you do eh! Madness.

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