Amidst a classic English rugby's greatest contests, the fixture involving the Tigers and the visitors proved to be as much about the emotion at half-time as any rugby during the pitch.
Martin Johnson led a contingent of Tigers old boys to pay tribute to Lewis Moody, after he announced his diagnosis with motor neurone disease.
When Moody wore a Leicester jersey at Welford Road, a decade and a half past, before moving to their rivals Bath for his final two seasons of a storied career, Leicester remained still at their very best, while Bath found themselves enduring a long drought devoid of championship success. The landscape has shifted dramatically since then. The Tigers’ great rivals arrived as champions, marking the first occasion they have called themselves that since the 1990s.
A Truly Passionate Welcome on Home Turf
Leicester, riding a powerful emotional surge, offered them an old-fashioned welcome, relishing their status as underdogs on their own pitch, the 18,000 Midlanders greatly inspired by Moody’s confession at half-time that regardless of his residence, Welford Road remains the home of his rugby heart.
In retrospect, the visiting side were always up against it. True to form, in a last-minute assault on the Bath line, the Tigers managed to coax a crucial penalty out of the Bath defence.
A Dramatic Decisive Moment
Billy Searle, on for the excellent James O’Connor, the experienced Wallaby making his first start for the club, darted blind, and Thomas du Toit caught him high, an infringement for which he received a yellow card. From the final play, Searle slotted the penalty kick on an angle to snatch a dramatic victory.
We might as well have been transported back of Moody’s pomp. Certainly, Leicester, who climb a little higher in the mid-table bun fight, can take great encouragement that a familiar frontal assault can still yield results, no matter the pedigree they face.
A Tale of Two Game Plans
The visitors were sublime with ball in hand. Therefore, Leicester, after a bewildering first half-hour which saw them trail 17-7, learned to deprive them of any. A succession of penalties against the away side kept Bath under constant pressure, their forwards thoroughly outplayed at the set piece for most of the match.
The Tigers' three touchdowns were carbon copies of each other, neither scored from more than a yard; Bath's three tries were studies in poetry. Frost, Underhill, and Redpath scored the tries, either side of Ollie Cracknell’s try for Leicester. Subsequently, on the back of those penalties, Reffell and Smith powered over for tries just before and just after the break.
A Tense Conclusion
Those scores gave Leicester a narrow advantage, an advantage they maintained for the majority of the second period. It appeared inevitable before Bath won enough ball to score their fourth. Actually, their scoring opportunity arrived via an infrequent penalty in the scrum, with their South African reinforcements now on the field. The fly-half, after missing two earlier kicks, landed the kick with a little less than 10 minutes to play.
This merely galvanized Leicester to launch one final, powerful assault, initiated by the energetic Hassell-Collins down the left. After earning the penalty that put Bath ahead where he is most comfortable, the unfortunate prop conceded where he is not. The outcome was then a foregone conclusion.