Sometimes it helps having a double World Cup champion in your side. There are numerous reasons why Leicester overturned an 11-point deficit to win a thrilling contest against Gloucester under blue skies and swirling winds. Their experienced bench played a role, as did greater accuracy in the backline after a disjointed opening. They rode their luck on occasion and it did not hurt playing against the most porous defence in the league.
A key factor, though, was the presence at fly-half of Handrè Pollard, who scored a crucial try at the start of the second half while kicking nine points in a three-point win.
The Springbok pivot missed for the first time this season on 23 minutes when he failed to convert Ollie Hassell-Collins’s wonder finish. That shank against the upright felt costly at the time as a little later Max Llewellyn bagged his second and Gloucester’s third try to take a healthy, and deserved, 19-8 lead into the break.
Shortly after the break – during which Leicester’s head coach, Michael Cheika, brought out the hairdryer on “the very lowest setting”, as he put it – the Tigers had a penalty within touching distance of the try line. They opted to tap and go and from neat interplay, including quick hands from Julián Montoya, Pollard had it on a blind run. After taking an initial hit, he powered over under the posts.
Rugby games so often have turning points; moments when momentum shifts and everything that had come before feels immaterial. This was it. And as soon as Pollard added the extras the result seemed inevitable.
“He’s a class player,” was the simple verdict from Cheika, who praised Pollard’s decision-making but chose instead to focus on the collective that now occupies third place in the Premiership. “He was able to play off the back of more physicality, more go-forward. We carried a bit harder, our ruck was more dynamic in the second half therefore we were able to maintain possession. And when you keep moving forward like that other things start to work for you.”
Leicester began to boss the point of contact which sucked in multiple defenders, a departure from Gloucester’s original plan to limit the number of bodies committed to the breakdown. Montoya was faultless at the lineout, which served as a springboard for meaty carries. Six minutes after Pollard’s try, Freddie Steward ran a scything line from midfield and played a simple pass on his outside for the supporting Josh Bassett to score in the corner.
Gloucester could not handle the greater impetus from their hosts despite commanding the first half. Tomos Williams, who came into the game with the second most linebreaks, initially ran the show at scrum-half with his fellow Welshman Llewellyn punching holes in midfield.
Arthur Clark set up a try for his second-row partner Freddie Thomas when the pair combined across 50 metres of running. And when Santiago Carreras hammered Olly Cracknell into touch a stunned silence rippled through the stands. Despite Hassell-Collins’s five-pointer, procured from 20 metres out even though he had two covering defenders to deal with, Leicester’s faithful had little to cheer.
Then Pollard scored. So, too, did Bassett. And when Dan Kelly charged over from close range following sustained pressure on 65 minutes, it seemed as if all of Gloucester’s fight had left them. There would be another twist but not another turning point.
With the game slipping away from the away side, and after Pollard had left the field, Llewellyn – tipped by George Skivington, Gloucester’s director of rugby, to earn a Wales call-up this week – registered his hat-trick when he straightened off his right foot from close range as Leicester’s defence was under threat. That made it a three-point game with eight minutes to play.
“I’m not concerned,” Skivington said when asked about his thoughts on his team’s second-half struggles. “That 10-minute block [after the restart] was the same last week. We’ve got to have a look at that. We’ve got a gameplan in place that demands a lot of the players. You’ve got to work extremely hard and we’re not quite there yet.”
Leicester held on. Maybe it was their stout defence or that Seb Blake dropped the ball over the line as Gloucester’s pack rumbled over from a well-worked maul. Or maybe it was an unshakeable winning mentality provided by a few serial winners, including one who’s won it all before.
