Bullied and broken: Geordan Murphy must give Leicester Tigers their snarl back to lift them out of this slump
The dismissal of Matt O’Connor shows Leicester’s ruthless streak is still alive off their field, but on it they must rekindle what once made this club so great
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Your support makes all the difference.If Matt O’Connor’s sacking one game into the Gallagher Premiership season achieves nothing else it has at least cemented Leicester Tigers position as the most ruthless English rugby club in the business.
Off the field that is.
The swift, summary and brutal execution of the “brash Aussie” who had been given little more than a year to prove he could go it alone after replacing Richard Cockerill, is very much in keeping with a club whose board has never allowed emotion to get in the way of the imperative for success. Just ask Dean Richards.
With a business-model reliant on top-flight European participation and reaching the domestic play-offs, if sacking a coach is what is needed then that is what must be done. It is a question of survival.
Saturday’s defeat by Exeter was so bad, so complete and so utterly rudderless the club’s board were left with no option; O’Connor had to go.
The board clearly has some questions of its own to answer and there is a growing mood among Leicester’s supporters not just for change among the coaching staff, but also at the very top of the organisation. It could be a messy few months.
Effectively an entire pre-season has been wasted when the 10-time league champions desperately needed to hit the ground running after last season’s unprecedented failure to reach the play-offs allied to an abject Champions Cup campaign.
At times on Saturday at Sandy Park, Leicester were barely crawling.
The comprehensive six-try defeat to Rob Baxter’s supremely well-drilled and physically fit Exeter team exposed Leicester as nothing short of a rabble.
Despite a team-sheet dripping with international calibre – and containing six England internationals boasting no fewer than 306 caps between them – Leicester lacked cohesion, direction and perhaps most alarming of all; hunger.
The set piece was shaky and half backs George Ford and Ben Youngs lacked ambition as first-choice Wallaby centre Matt Toomua was criminally underused and England wing Jonny May looked a shadow of the player who lit up England’s summer tour to South Africa.
Leicester’s tackle success rate of just a little over 70 per cent smacked of a team who simply weren’t up for the physical challenge posed by Exeter. That, above all else, did for O’Connor.
So what now for a club which has been overtaken on the field by Exeter, Saracens, Wasps and even Newcastle (whose victory at Welford Road at the end of last season saw them secure the last play-off spot and should surely have sealed O’Connor’s fate)?
Firstly, interim head coach Geordan Murphy needs to be given the club’s total backing.
"The club have said that they'll give me every support in order to make this team successful,” Murphy said on Tuesday as he prepared the side to face Newcastle on Saturday.
“It's very much a short-term appointment at the moment and it's really about trying to get the team performing at the weekend.
“I think a lot of people will be surprised about the timing of it (O’Connor’s sacking), it's very early in the season.
“It's not nice, unfortunately it's happened a few times in the last few years at Tigers and some of the players are getting used to it.”
That last line should shame Leicester’s senior players into redoubling their efforts to lift the club back to where belongs; at English rugby’s top table.
Ford and Youngs must be given licence to play by the coaches and a forward platform upon which to do so. The England duo were painfully timid at Sandy Park but that was only a reflection of the handcuffs imposed by O’Connor and a feeble forward effort which bore no resemblance to the Tigers packs of old which would have been more than a match for most international packs. Leicester were bullied, and not for the first time.
Tigers desperately need to get their snarl back. They need to become hard-nosed and hard to beat and Welford Road needs to become a fortress again.
With the biggest fan-base in the country, Tigers have the support but those loyal supporters need the players to give them something, anything to cheer about.
Murphy must work overtime to get the team fit. They were played off the park by an Exeter team who are now the undisputed standard bearers for physical preparation in the Premiership.
Manu Tuilagi needs to spend several more weeks conditioning before he returns to play while Dan Cole must be better managed to get the best out of a magnificently-committed 31-year-old tighthead prop who has far too many miles on the clock for a player his age. Cole needs a rest and a drastic reduction in the amount of rugby he is asked to play. At the moment, he looks burnt out.
Above all else, Tigers players need to respect the heritage of the club. The likes of Martin Johnson, Neil Back, Darren Garforth, Cockerill and Lewis Moody would have fought to the proverbial death for the right to wear a Leicester shirt on or off the training field.
Some of the present squad look as if they wouldn’t fancy fighting their way out of a paper bag.
Leicester Tigers need to get nasty on the field, not just off it.
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