Following Leicester Tigers’ 28-7 win over Northampton Saints in the East Midlands derby, here are our five key takeaways from the PREM Rugby clash.
The top line
The East Midlands Derby delivered once again as Tigers took the spoils with a brilliant second-half turnaround. Saints went up the tunnel at half-time 7-3 ahead, with 58% of the ball behind them and the only try of the half, James Pater’s after six minutes off Fin Smith’s chip over the top and Searle’s one-handed fumble underneath it. Not long into the second-half, though, they were 21-7 behind, their scrum in pieces, their penalty count at 17 and a derby first played at Victoria Park in 1888 going exactly the way the weather said it would.
But Tigers went back to old-school pragmatism at half-time: scrum, maul, kick long, chase hard, and let the rain and Saints’ discipline do the rest. Jamie Blamire from the maul at 43 minutes, Henderson off Solomone Kata’s decoy line at 51, Finn Carnduff from a short carry and pass at 56, and the game was gone long before Tom Lockett’s yellow card at 69; Freddie Steward adding a fourth from another drive. Joe Heyes, Player of the Match, made 12 tackles without missing one and dismantled Emmanuel Iyogun at the scrum for an hour, and Ollie Chessum was immense.
The proof is in the numbers. Saints carried 51 times for 275 metres to Tigers’ 43 for 197, built 83 rucks to 71, won the turnover count five to three, and scored seven points; Tigers kicked 723 metres to 543, had 64% of the ball after half-time, conceded 11 penalties to Saints’ 19. In a monsoon, that’s the whole story, and it leaves Saints with a sixth straight league defeat on the road whilst Tigers move to 16 points, level with Gloucester.
Where the game was won
In the front-row, and in the mud under it, was the battle of the match. Here’s the thing about scrummaging in torrential rain: a prop’s stance is everything, because if he sets too short his hips buckle the moment the drive comes on, and if he sets too long his studs don’t bite and he folds at the waist, and Saints managed both in the same afternoon. Cleopas Kundiona slipped on his own put-in at 28 minutes and gave up the penalty; Iyogun set too long against Heyes and was rinsed, scrum after scrum, until Tigers minced one completely on 55; Saints swapped the whole front-row at 62 and Ion Neculai promptly set too long as well. Tigers finished at 100% on their own ball, Saints at 55, and in a game where the ball spent half its life on the floor, that’s where the penalty count came from.
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The maul finished what the scrum started, which is the surprise of the night, because for 40 minutes Blamire’s throwing was a nosebleed of a game: three poor throws by 27 minutes, six lineouts lost by 37, the last of them knocked on at the top under Josh Kemeny’s pressure. The first half, in truth, was an afternoon for a tax inspector, and the game provided on in the shape of HMRC employee Craig Maxwell-Keys, diligently examining two sets of untidy accounts, eight Tigers handling errors to three by the 34th minute and 12 Saints penalties by the 43rd. After the break, the throws found their men, the drive went forward, Blamire scored off the first of them and Steward off the last, and Tigers made one handling error in the 46 minutes that followed, which brings us to the half-time talk.
By all accounts it came in two parts. The first came from the Tigers coaches and we’re pretty sure it was straight out of the Darren Garforth and Dosser Smith school of pragmatism. The second came, unwittingly, from Henry Pollock, who had words with Chessum on the way up the steps, got pushed up them for his trouble with Coles, Tommy Freeman and Tom Pearson wading in, and, word from the Leicester end has it, annoyed the home dressing room into the best 20 minutes of their season. Great team talk, Henry.
Tigers learnings
The pack is a weapon again. Heyes was the best player on the pitch; Chessum made 11 tackles without a miss and carried like a man who’d taken the stairs personally, though three handling errors in the wet is the one blot on his evening; Ollie Cracknell’s 24 tackles were the most on the park, with 22 and two turnovers from van der Flier beside him. Carnduff, who captained England’s Under-20s, took his try off Heyes’ short pass and looks a promising player. Hamer-Webb justified the Wales call-up that came through this week, and Steward’s afternoon deserves its own line: a 51-metre penalty at 18 minutes with the wind, four defenders beaten and two clean breaks on a day nobody could hold the ball, and his ninth PREM try against Saints, more than any Leicester player has managed in the fixture.
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The learning that cuts the other way is at nine. Jack van Poortvliet kicked 18 times for 510 metres and on the sheet outkicked Alex Mitchell by a hundred metres; on the eye, his first half was a mess, a dreadful pass to Chessum at 17, two rucks in his own 22 that lost 12 metres and ended with a kick that missed touch, a weak pass Blamire dropped at 33, a charge-down at 35. He kicks far and he kicks the same way every time, whilst Mitchell varies length, trajectory and the speed he gets the ball away, and that’s the gap when it comes to test matches- but on the day JVP’s team won the match.
Saints learnings
They cannot win on the road, and six in a row now says it for them. Nineteen penalties, 12 of them by the 43rd minute, reads as the model under Craig Maxwell-Keys as much as anything, offsides at the kick-chase, Pollock twice, and a scrum that kept going down, but penalties are bodies, and in a wind each one is 40 metres of territory handed over with no ruck to build for it. Saints had 58% of the first half, carried more, ran further and built a dozen more rucks than Tigers over 80 minutes, and the return was one try from the one piece of class Fin Smith produced before the rain closed in. Possession in the wet is only an asset if you turn it into points per entry, and Saints didn’t; they were held up over the line once and lost a five-metre lineout with the last throw of the match, which is the most unlike-Saints showing you’ll see all season.
The Lockett card needs setting out properly, because the reaction will outrun the facts. Adam Radwan was shown yellow for a deliberate knock-on at 69 minutes; the review found a head clash between Kata and Lockett in the same passage, Radwan’s card was reversed and Lockett went instead. Harsh on the lad, given the speed of it, but the framework says head contact without mitigation is a card and the referee applied the framework. Two minutes later Steward scored from a maul against 14 men. Pivot point, yes, but at 21-7 it pivoted a game that had already gone.
Mitchell was in a different league for 57 minutes, 15 kicks for 405 metres, 47 passes and every kick a different shape, and then he went off with Pearson and the match still, in theory, alive. Coles’ 150th brought ten tackles and a steal, and Pollock was annoying in a good way, two turnovers, nine tackles, two offsides, a shove on the stairs and a booing off at 52 that he’ll have taken as applause. If the PREM ever introduces a Most Annoying Player of the Year award, he wins it, and his own teammates vote for him en masse.
England watch
Steve Borthwick names his squad tomorrow, and this one wrote a few lines of it for him. Heyes closed the tighthead argument, if it was still open: 12 tackles with none missed, a scrum at 100% on his own ball and Iyogun’s afternoon ruined. Chessum was the best forward on either side for an hour and the three handling errors are the price of carrying in that rain. Steward is the wet-weather full-back England haven’t picked often enough, and George Furbank’s shirt is less certain tonight than it was at lunchtime.
At nine, nothing changed: Mitchell starts because he varies, van Poortvliet covers because he kicks a mile. Fin Smith’s chip for Pater was the moment of the first half and he carried ten times with three defenders beaten in a losing side, which is a fair return; Freeman’s 13 carries and three offloads were honest work in the wet, undone by one mix-up with Pater under a kick at 36; Pollock goes as the bench disruptor, two turnovers and two penalties in the same 52 minutes; and Carnduff, for the longer view, is a name for 2027.
Scrum, maul, kick, chase, and 25 points without reply in the rain. Old-school Tigers, and somewhere in the middle of Mattioli Woods Welford Road, we suspect that the two ageing Tigers’ greats, Darren Garforth and Dosser Smith, are nodding with quiet approval into their pints of real ale.