By Whaley Shark
December 28 2010

OK, the promise of some early season performances has evaporated, we’ve rather lost our way, chopping and changing from one cup to another to the Premiership, and back again, we played our last home game in Scotland and, barring miracles, we are probably out of Europe. So let’s sack the Head Coach and give his successor a trip to Welford Road to start his reign.

My father always used to say “Scores in the first ten minutes don’t mean anything”. Well, yesterday they certainly did, because Leicester had taken the game away from us with two converted tries in less than ten minutes. However, I’m not going to do a blow-by-blow report because most of you will have watched it on the telly, and I was in the upper tier of the shiny new Caterpillar stand with only a rather detached view of the game, surrounded by posh people eating pork pies (with mustard if you please!). So you’ll have seen more of the detail than I did.

Bizarrely, I am quite encouraged by today. If you look back exactly twelve months, we put out one of last season’s infamous “away” sides, tackled solidly and lost 32-6 at Welford Road. While we made Tigers fight all the way for the bonus point, which they only got as our scrum folded up at the death, we never looked like scoring a try.

Today, by contrast, we were caught cold from the kick-off, first giving Tigers a turnover which put us under pressure until Anthony Allen crossed after seven minutes, then a sluggish defence stood by as Tigers ran the restart straight back at us and, with slick interpassing, Alesana Tuilagi scored. We didn’t even get into the game until more than 20 minutes had passed and they’d scored again, but then we built a decent attacking position and Boko sneaked over from short range. Although we recovered some composure and had a good 15 minutes both in defence and attack, Tigers finally stretched our defence to breaking point and Manu Tuilagi exploited an overlap on the left to pick up the try bonus before half time.

The Tigers masterclass continued after half time, building pressure from the kick-off and with a peachy switch of direction, putting Scott Hamilton in, and following up a few minutes later with Manu Tuialgi’s second, as he carved through some poor defence. At 42-7 and with half an hour to go, we showed some fine character, working down the left from deep in our own half to set up an attacking position, then Dwayne Peel taking a quick tap penalty in the Tigers 22 and crossing for a try. Unimpressed, Tigers came back with two further tries, Scott Hamilton and Matt Smith, in five minutes. The final action was a try for Kristian Ormsby, started from a tap penalty deep in our half, and made with some fine handling and fast recycling. 54-21 was a fair reflection of an entertaining game.

What do I think? Basically, we made a fair number of errors, and Tigers punished them all, mercilessly.

Scrum- did much better than I expected against strong opponents. I see Lee Imiolek was the offy Man of the Match, and that’s fine by me.

Lineout- better than I’ve seen so far this season.

Defence- less organised than it has been, and lapses exploited ruthlessly by Tigers.

Restarts- not great; we gave them a lot of ball this way.

One or two other silly errors, like penalties which found Tigers’ players, not touch. Maybe Charlie’s short but sure kicks have something going for them.

Pluses- three tries, two of which were like the Sale I started watching a long time ago.

In my view, that performance would have beaten the other sides in the bottom third of the table, probably got something from those in mid-table and, given time and a bit less disruption, we shouldn’t fear the top teams either. We have the raw material and I wish Big Red every success in making something from it.