England will be without Tom Croft for the rest of the Six Nations championship after the Leicester flanker dislocated his right shoulder during the narrow win over a deeply frustrated Newcastle. The 29-year-old, who was taken to hospital in considerable pain, is also likely to miss the remainder of a Premiership season in which it grows ever tighter at the top.
The unfortunate Croft, who has been a regular selection on the England bench during this tournament, has endured a desperate run of misfortune with injuries and will be hoping he recovers swiftly enough to play a full part in England’s pre-World Cup training. Northampton’s Tom Wood now looks set to return to the match-day 23 against Scotland on Saturday.
Leicester’s disappointment, however, will be tinged with relief they are still firmly in play-off contention after taking 75 minutes to sneak ahead of a Newcastle team who at times in the third quarter seemed to be heading for a convincing victory. The Tigers are still outside the top four on points difference but are only a couple of points off second position with five games to play.
Their director of rugby, Richard Cockerill, was swift to concede that significant improvement would be required if Leicester are to take their customary place in the play-offs. They still have to play fellow top-six sides Exeter, Saracens, Wasps and Northampton and, even with Dan Cole, Ben Youngs and Manu Tuilagi to return, are still not consistently showing the destructive rhythm of old. “We’re going to have to play considerably better if we’re going to beat the sides around us,” Cockerill said.
Newcastle were left to kick themselves for letting a potentially sweet win slip. For the seventh time this season they scored more tries than their opponents and still lost, leaving their director of rugby, Dean Richards, understandably unhappy. “When we’ve got a chance to put our foot on the throat of the opposition, we’ve got to make that happen. It’s not the referee’s fault. We had so much possession and territory and enough line-breaks to kill them off but we didn’t.”
It was even more galling given Richards’ former Leicester connections, not to mention those of his fellow coach John Wells and the former Leicester favourite Alesana Tuilagi. To balance things up the visitors featured Geoff Parling and Mathew Tait, both of whom once regarded Kingston Park as home, with the sight of Tait playing opposite his brother Alex merely reinforcing the theme of old friends reunited.
The equation for Newcastle, however, was simple: could their deeds in other areas make up for their injury crisis at tighthead prop where they had been forced to sign Rob O’Donnell from Worcester as an emergency replacement to fulfil the fixture? It was not the world’s biggest surprise when the referee, Luke Pearce, awarded four scrum penalties against them in the first 25 minutes as the beefy, young Alex Rogers fell foul of the wily Marcos Ayerza.
Parling, in contention for an England bench spot, was busy throughout but behind the scrum Leicester again looked largely out of sorts in comparison with a Newcastle side who, on their new artificial pitch, are pursuing a far more open style of rugby. Both tries scored in the first half went to the home team, the first a forward rumble finished by Scott Lawson, the second a spectacular effort by Sinoti Sinoti. Every time the Samoan winger gets the ball a buzz goes around the ground and he did fantastically well to score in the right corner despite the tackles of Niki Goneva and Adam Thompstone.
Had Newcastle kept fractionally calmer in the third quarter they might have won comfortably after turning round 12-6 ahead in front of an encouraging crowd of over 9,000. The scrum-half, Ruki Tipuna, was dragged down short, Sinoti wriggled around like a mad trout, Tom Catterick was short with a long-range penalty attempt and another mazy run from the fly-half could also have yielded another try.
Unfortunately Newcastle’s game management was nothing like as effective; every time they complicated things, overcooked a restart or dropped the ball, another scrum would give Leicester an easy foothold back in the contest. Even so it was still 12-9 to Newcastle with just over five minutes left when Freddie Burns’ cross-kick to the right corner forced the brothers Tait into an aerial sibling duel in the in-goal area. As they collided the ball fell loose and the Leicester replacement Tommy Bell pounced on it to score.
Burns’ conversion from wide out completed the job, leaving Newcastle to lament what should have been. “It’s frustrating,” Richards said. “We should be angry about it. We’re playing a really good brand of rugby but that’s not enough. If we’d kept our composure I’d have been sitting here with a really nice victory. It’s an immaturity and understanding thing.”
Newcastle A Tait; Sinoti, Powell, Socino, Tuilagi (Cato, 76); Catterick, Tipuna (Takulua, 76); Vickers, Lawson (Hawkins, 76), Rogers, Barrow, Thompson (Furno, ht), Mayhew (Saull, 76), Welch (capt), Wilson.
Tries Lawson, Sinoti. Con Catterick.
Leicester M Tait; Morris (Bell, 43), Goneva, Bai (Roberts, 67), Thompstone; Burns, Harrison (Mele, 69); Ayerza (Rizzo, 60) T Youngs (capt; Ghiraldini, 60), Mulipola (Balmain, 60), De Chaves, Parling, Croft (Crane, 59), Gibson, Pearce (Crane, 64)
Try Bell. Con Burns. Pens Burns 3.
Referee L Pearce (RFU). Attendance 9,019.
