A Golden Month - Leicester Preview

By BrianC
November 23 2005

This Friday evening we face what is usually one of the toughest fixtures of our season as we travel to Welford Road to take on Leicester Tigers.

The Pussycats are justifiably proud of their home record down the years and we will have our work cut out for us to come away from this match with a victory. That said, this is by no means a ‘mission impossible’. Even we have managed to do this once before in the professional era, albeit by the narrowest of margins. That was with a team who were struggling to avoid relegation.

The London Irish team, vintage 05/06, looks to be a cut above those we have seen (suffered?) in recent seasons and are perhaps more able to test a weakened Leicester team than any we have sent to WR since Brendan Venter’s era. Certainly we didn’t make much inroads against them last season. In September we were well beaten 22 - 39 at the Madejski and in March we lost again 15 - 6 at Welford Road.

It is fair to say that Leicester are more weakened by International call ups at this time than ourselves. This was particularly apparent a couple of weeks ago when they were duffed up by the Worcester pack as they went down 15 - 11 at Sixways. Despite what some media commentators have said we also have lost players, five in total, to International duty.

At the start of this month, Skippy said that his target was to take ten points from our four GP games. After our bonus point victory over Bath he revised this to fifteen. With subsequent victories away at Newcastle and at home to Gloucester we have now collected thirteen points thus far this November.

Can we make this a golden month with four wins out of four? We just might you know. If so we’ll be looking well set for a HC spot come the end of the season. There is even an outside chance we could go second in the table, something we have not managed since the wonderful 2001/2 season.