It’s not entirely clear what bus routes can reveal about a rugby club, but for Sunday evening’s home game against Toulon, the back-to-back champions of the European Cup, the reigning champions of France’s Top 14 and generally the most feared team on the continent, Leicester are promoting pick-up services for their supporters in Market Bosworth, Market Harborough, Melton Mowbray, Oakham and Nuneaton. And there is also a separate minibus service from Coalville.
In the list of stops, there’s a bit of battlefield, an echo of heavy industry, pork pies and stilton. It is the heartland of English rugby, shire towns around the capital of the game, the city of Leicester itself. It is homely and well fed, but also tough.
In the years just after the turn of the millennium, when the Leicester Tigers ruled Europe as emphatically as Rugby Club Toulonnais now do, they gave off a particular warmth.
This was heat so well contained by thick layers of insulation that only those on the inside felt the glow. Leicester guarded their secrets tightly – as tight as the clenched fist of the utterly formidable Martin Johnson – and cruelly went about their business, adored in the surrounding ring of market towns and pit villages, envied by the wider world.
This season there was a printing mistake in the list of results. Somebody wrote down Bath 45 Leicester 0. Didn’t that somebody know the slightest thing about rugby? Didn’t they think to ask their supervisor? They did; they had. The score stood. How many choked on their Melton Mowbray pie on that day in the middle of September, and on the weekends that followed, with defeats to London Irish at home and Gloucester away?
Richard Cockerill is now the head coach of the club but once he was the molten core of the Leicester power unit, its hooker. The only difference between him and his captain, Johnson, packing down behind him, was that Cockerill tore off the insulation. He was and is a human brazier, his words showering out as sparks, his defiance glowing like a branding iron.
But he was hurting. Paul Burke, coach of the backs, was released in October. Cockerill nevertheless did his best to keep calm and explain that with his side’s injury list at the time – they were without Dan Cole, Tom Youngs, Ed Slater, Geoff Parling, Tom Croft and Manu Tuilagi among others – it was no wonder they were struggling.
This was lobbed back at him as a suggestion that the injuries came as a result of the club’s infamously unrestrained training methods. Cockerill could do little but seethe – you could heat Rutland Water with his frustration – and concentrate on the only strategy that might keep him in a job: recovery. In the month of November, Leicester gained revenge over London Irish, beat London Welsh and London Wasps and drew with the only London side playing in London, Saracens.
That’s a lot of London in a sentence about Leicester, but it means that Cockerill’s team face Toulon not in a state of disrepair but with rekindled fire. Tuilagi will not reappear until the end of this month but just about all the missing forwards are available for selection.
Such has been the trauma and so great is Sunday’s challenge that Cockerill still keeps his expectations on the chilled setting: “Toulon are the stellar team of Europe. They’ve got a squad to die for. We’ll just go on full-bore and try and fire the first bullets, and make sure we make it as uncomfortable as we can for them.”
The head coach is promising little in public. But within the tight confines of the huddle, the dial will be set to full blast. This European Champions Cup round three is Leicester’s only home fixture of December. It is the perfect time to board the buses in the sentinel towns that surround Welford Road and make the heartland glow red-hot.
Wales will miss Williams – the giant with a tear in his eye
I saw Ray Williams the week before last. He was not well at all, but his handshake was of a strong man not quite yet ready to die. He was dressed to eat out – he was about to head 70-odd miles east from his bungalow on the outskirts of Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, to his favourite Chinese restaurant in, of all places, Aberkenfig, just north of Bridgend. He made it there and back; he passed away on Wednesday at the age of 87. Ray, without being a player, was a giant of rugby in Wales, the man who brought squad systems into the international game in the 1960s, a coaching innovator and a meticulous organiser as secretary of the WRU. He could be stern, our Raymond, but he also had a twinkle in his eye, a leader who could tick off an upstart and refuse to yield on any point. And then bark out a laugh and effortlessly formulate a compromise. He was old-fashioned, but also way ahead of his time.
