In terms of breathless, end-to-end entertainment this frenzied blur of a midlands derby was unquestionably the club game of the season so far. For Leicester, however, the bitter comfortably outweighed the sweet in the wake of the 40th-minute red card shown to their lock Will Spencer which swayed an eight-try thriller in Wasps’ favour and reignited the vexed debate over rugby’s illegal tackle directives.
By the letter of the rule book the decision to send off the towering Spencer for making contact with the head of the Wasps hooker Tommy Taylor was justified given the much-publicised crusade against high tackles in the modern game. At the same time, it grows harder by the day for players, coaches and match officials to negotiate the tightrope between a physical contact sport and the sort of fractional tackle misjudgments that look even worse in slow motion.
Geordan Murphy, the Tigers acting head coach, is firmly of the opinion that a game intended for all shapes and sizes is heading in the wrong direction if it penalises a towering 6ft 7in lock forward for clattering too high into a much shorter, slightly stooping opponent.
Leicester legend Geordan Murphy on a mission to restore Tigers’ bite
“I think the game’s gone a little bit too PC,” said the former Ireland full-back, suggesting he would be better off in future picking only five-foot tall players. “That for me is crazy. It’s rugby. Tommy Taylor was fine, [Wasps’ director of rugby] Dai Young seemed OK with it, there was no HIA [head injury assessment], there was no real danger to the player. It’s killed the game really.”
Murphy genuinely believes rugby is now heading towards a place he will shortly struggle to recognise. “I just see the game becoming very different to the game I played and love. It’s a collision sport that’s supposed to be for all sizes. What we’re probably going to end up with is players being more uniform like rugby league. If that’s a headshot Tommy Taylor probably stays down and has an HIA. He doesn’t so it wasn’t a head shot, was it? From our point of view it wasn’t a red card.”
The flip side, as highlighted by Young, is that a game which tolerates unpunished hits to the head, intentional or not, is heading down a rocky road in terms of proactive concussion prevention. “Whether it has to go that way or not, it’s clear, isn’t it? That’s the law. We’ve had the directive that any tackle direct to the head is a red card.”
It was a shame, either way. The first half had fizzed and crackled with such energy that a mini-classic was on the cards and Leicester, still level at 35-35 with seven minutes to go, deserved significant credit for staying in the fight as long as they did despite going 14-0 behind inside the first quarter of an hour.
Rugby union: talking points from the Premiership’s weekend action
If there was a touch of fortune involved in the hosts’ first score, with Elliot Daly’s initial attempted clearance ricocheting off Tevita Veianu’s face, there was nothing lucky about Josh Bassett’s striking midfield break or Dan Robson’s nifty scoring pass to the lurking Juan De Jongh. When Bassett then rose splendidly to gather Daly’s cross-kick and touch down in the left corner, Manu Tuilagi’s bright start for Tigers felt still more irrelevant.
Under Murphy, though, Leicester will always be positive and George Ford soon threaded an inch-perfect grubber into the Wasps in-goal area which the electric Jonny May did superbly well to pounce on before it reached the dead-ball line. The argument about who should wear the starting No 10 jersey for England this autumn is hotting up nicely, with Ford heavily involved in three of his side’s four tries and also supplying 15 points. Robson also had a lively joust with England’s first-choice scrum-half Ben Youngs, his quick tap which preceded the excellent Nathan Hughes’ 23rd-minute try another example of his sharpness.
Dan Cole, on his 200th appearance for Tigers, was also keen to impress given the manner in which Wasps’ tighthead Kieran Brookes has started the season but could count himself a touch fortunate, in the circumstances, not to be carded for a late charge on Robson. It seemed to stir something among his teammates, though, as Leicester worked their way back upfield for Ford to beat a couple of defenders and put Veainu over to reduce the margin to 22-18.
Then came the Spencer incident, doubly punished by a booming Daly penalty, but improbably it was Leicester who hit back through Sione Kalamafoni with Hughes in the sin-bin. In terms of defenders beaten nothing outdid the swerving, swaying 45-metre run to line from De Jongh for his second try of the day but Leicester kept going valiantly, another telling dart from Ford putting the supporting May over for his second to put Tigers ahead with 22 minutes left.
Three last-quarter penalties from Lima Sopoaga ultimately settled a memorable contest, if not the post-match arguments.