London Welsh v Leicester - The Premiership Premiere Preview!

By Mark W-J
August 29 2012

This Sunday, London Welsh will make their debut appearance in the Aviva Premiership when they entertain Leicester Tigers at their new home, the Kassam Stadium in Oxford. In doing so they will become the 28th team to play top-flight rugby in England, after their prolonged promotion battle eventually brought an end to a record-breaking fourteen year stay in the second tier of the league pyramid.

Leicester are one of only four clubs who have spent each of the twenty five years of league rugby in the top flight. During that time twelve promoted sides have been relegated at the first time of asking, but only one club - Coventry, in the inaugural 1987-88 season - have enjoyed just one season among the elite, never to return. Most fans and pundits expect Welsh to sink without trace this season given that our promotion wasn’t ratified until 29^th June - a month after we’d won the Championship play-off final, and barely nine weeks before the start of the new season. Opening our campaign against the most successful club of the modern era only adds to the conspiracy theorists’ view that Premier Rugby want to put us firmly in our place after we challenged the operations of their cartel in the courts over the summer.

Richmond to Oxford
Just a short hop up the Thames!

Many people at London Welsh are seemingly stuck in a sepia-tinted world in which we were the dominant team in England, supplying a then-record seven players on the British Lions’ tour of New Zealand in 1971. But for all this prowess, all of the Merit Table Pennants and Middlesex Sevens titles, we never came close to capturing any official silverware, failing to make it to the final of the RFU Knockout Cup in its various guises until our centenary year, 1985. By then Leicester had established themselves as the pre-eminent force in English rugby, losing 6-3 to Gloucester in the final of the John Player Cup in 1978, but returning to win three successive finals from 1979-81 and earning the right to keep the original trophy. Although Bath won ten of the thirteen finals from 1984-1996, the dawn of league rugby in 1987 gave the Tigers the chance to assert their authority, and they were duly crowned Champions with a final day win over Waterloo. However, their west country rivals claimed the crown in six of the next eight seasons, thereby completing the league and cup double on four occasions, with Tigers collecting each trophy just once during this time.

The dawn of professionalism, however, has seen Leicester re-emerge as the leaders of the pack. They won four consecutive league titles from 1999-2002, with further titles in 2007, 2009 and 2010; they have played in each of the last eight Premiership finals at Twickenham; they have never finished in the bottom half of the top flight of English rugby; they are the only English team to qualify for the Heineken Cup in each year that the Premiership clubs have competed; in 2002, they became the first team to retain the Heineken Cup, having been the first English finalists in their debut campaign in 1996-97; they contributed seven players to England’s World Cup winning squad of 2003; and in 2005 they broke the record previously held by London Welsh when eight players were selected for the British & Irish Lions’ tour to New Zealand. To paraphrase Phil Bennett: and that's who we’re playing on Sunday afternoon…

The current Leicester squad contains twelve players who are in the England Elite Player or Saxons squads, while there are at least eight more full internationals on their books, including Geordan Murphy (74 caps for Ireland) and Martin Castrogiovani (84 caps for Italy). Castro was Premiership player of the year in his debut season in England yet such is the Tigers’ strength-in-depth, he shares tighthead duties with the current England No.3, Dan Cole. The Tigers moniker was first used in a newspaper report in 1885, five years after the club’s formation, although the reason is unclear. The team’s colours were originally black, but it is possible that they occasionally wore brown and orange shirts; an alternative theory is that it made reference to the Leicester Regiment’s nickname, which had been picked-up when they wore a ‘royal’ tiger cap-badge whilst serving in India. The now famous colours of red, green and white were first adopted as vertical stripes in 1891, changing to hoops four years later, while the club badge was changed from the old coat of arms to the tiger’s head in 2006.

For many years Leicester have had a reputation for employing a big pack to devastating effect. On many occasions their eight have dug them out of trouble, the front row forcing their opposition into submission to gain a penalty try, or the old favourite catch-and-drive, from which the blond head of Neil Back so often emerged to claim another five points. Yet while the likes of Castro, Cole, Tom Youngs, Lewis Deacon, Graham Kitchener, Geoff Parling, Tom Croft and Thomas Waldrom are following in the hard-to-fill footsteps of Rowntree, Cockerill, Garforth, White, West, Johnson, Richards, Back, Moody, Corry and Wheeler (to name just a few), it’s easy to forget that this is a club which has also fielded the attacking threat of the Underwood brothers, Cusworth, Liley, Healey, Greenwood, Serevi, Rabeni and a roomful of Tuilagis. Last season started horribly, with five defeats from the opening six matches during the World Cup, but the remaining sixteen rounds produced fourteen wins and a draw, with a solitary defeat at Exeter during the Six Nations, and they reeled-off six consecutive bonus point wins as they demonstrated that they are much more than just an eight-man steamroller.

England International Geoff Parling
Part of Tigers' power in the pack

Leicester have actually lost their opening Premiership fixture in each of the last three seasons, but it would take a very brave man to bet against them this Sunday. We’ve only played once in a competitive fixture, a third-round Pilkington Cup tie at ODP in January 1990 which the Tigers won 43-3, while the last meeting was in a friendly at Welford Road nearly six years later, when we were comfortably swept aside 63-19. Many supporters have been heartened by our performances in defeat in two pre-season friendlies at Bath and the Scarlets, but the gulf between the Championship and the Premiership is huge. Consider the fortunes of our top try scorers in the first two years of the Championship, Errie Claassens and Josh Drauniniu, who have just completed a year in the Premiership with Worcester. In six years at level two (firstly at Rotherham and then with Welsh), Errie scored 54 tries in 122 starts, but despite starting eleven times for the Warriors last term he failed to get on the scoresheet, although he did manage three in the European Challenge Cup against Bucuresti and Parma. Josh, meanwhile, touched-down 35 times in 44 starts during his two years at Exeter before adding a further 14 tries from 18 starts in his one year at Welsh. Last term, however, he started just once in the Premiership for the Warriors, scoring on the final day of the season at Northampton, although he did add a further four scores against the Romanian and Italian clubs in Europe. Yet every one of last season’s squad has to step-up and show a marked improvement in all aspects of his game if we are to have the faintest chance of survival.

Captain Jon Mills and Chairman Bleddyn Phillips
Leadership on and off the field

As previously mentioned, almost every pundit - amateur and professional - has tipped London Welsh to finish bottom of the Premiership this season. Brian Moore suggested that by the time Gavin Henson (you didn’t think I’d forget every journalist’s contractual obligation to mention our star signing, did you…?) returns he will be ‘marshalling a fight for Premiership survival’, while his former England and Harlequins teammate, Paul Ackford, believes that we will be ‘cut adrift by Christmas’. In the words of Andy Ripley: Dare we hope? We dare. Can we hope? We can. Should we hope? We must.

London Welsh v Leicester - The Premiership Premiere Preview!

Posted by: The Dragons' Den (IP Logged)

Date: 30/08/2012 09:42

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