Manu Tuilagi is reflecting on a run of injuries that have plagued his career at the very point the Leicester centre should have been in his prime. “Life is never a straight road,” he says, unless, that is, he has the ball under an arm and a hapless defender in his sights. It was not an observation he would have made when the rugby world seemed to be at his feet five years ago, an England international and a Lion who had gone on the rampage against the 2012 All Blacks at the age of 21.
Now 27, fortune’s quiverful of arrows has given him perspective, along with one-to-one sessions with a sports psychologist used by Leicester, Matt Thombs. Tuilagi started 21 matches for the Tigers in 2012-13, but made an average of seven in the next four years. His tally of 12 starts last season has been followed by 10 this campaign and he came off the bench for England against Australia last month.
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“Matt has helped me with my game,” says Tuilagi. “He has taught me that when you suffer a setback you do not say: ‘Oh no,’ but focus on getting fit and playing again. You cannot think of what it would be like if you were not injured. It is tough and you do not realise how bad you are feeling until you go past it, but it is life. Now I press the reset button.”
Would a younger Tuilagi have taken up the offer of help from a psychologist? “Not a chance. I was never interested before when I did not think of the outcome. I did not think it would help now but decided to try something new. It has helped, quite a lot – it’s amazing actually. I gave it a go and now everything makes sense.”
Making sense of Leicester’s fall from the top in the past five years to the point where they could slump to the bottom of the Premiership if they lose at home to Harlequins next weekend and other results go against them, is something else. The Tigers have the distraction of a Champions Cup return against Racing 92 at Welford Road on Sunday, but it is the league that is their prime concern.
Tuilagi, though, has conditioned himself not to look beyond the next match, not daring now to plan ahead. The fixture against Harlequins will pitch the visitors’ director of rugby, Paul Gustard, against his interim opposite number at Leicester, Geordan Murphy, a room‑mate when they played for the Tigers at the end of the 1990s. But Tuilagi is not thinking about that or the Six Nations and a potential first England start for nearly five years or the World Cup. He has learned to live in the moment. “The only game that is important is Racing, because it is the next one,” says Tuilagi. “We can focus on Harlequins after what I hope is a victory.”
Yet, for the first time in his nine seasons with the club, Leicester are involved in a scrap at the bottom, although such is the congestion below the top two that while they are three points above the basement occupiers, Newcastle, they are only six points off a play-off place.
“I don’t know,” says Tuilagi, when asked why Leicester have declined from perennial Premiership finalists to play-off qualifiers and then also-rans whose 100% qualification record for the Champions Cup is under threat. “My mentality has not changed: I always expect to be good and that is the pressure. We missed out on the top four last season by a point, the first time for 14 years. I believe we are still up there; we have the squad to do it and just need a bit of belief. In all my time at the Tigers, we have never started well.”
Leicester are on a run of seven straight defeats, including three in the Premiership and one in Europe, at Racing last weekend. They lost six in a row in the league and Champions Cup this time last year and in the campaign before that lost five on the spin either side of Christmas. The difference this season is their appalling defensive record, with seven try bonus points given up in 12 league and European matches and three tries conceded in each of the other five.
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“There is no easy game in the Premiership now,” says Tuilagi. “All the teams are improving, but while we have not been getting the results, for me nothing changes. We will still get there, no matter what. We are not halfway through the season yet and we have to be positive.
“It is tough when you are where we are and it is easy to say ‘forget it’, but we are the Tigers and that is not our mentality. We will be there at the end of the season: it is not the start that counts. We just need a few good games to get back and it starts this weekend. We have the players and we are getting there, as we showed in Paris last weekend when we were disappointed not to win. You have to believe and be excited.”
France could be Tuilagi’s next destination. His contract with Leicester is up at the end of the season and Toulon are reported to be among his suitors. He is speaking before Murphy’s weekly media conference, at which he is asked about the centre’s future and replies that if it comes down to money, Leicester will not be able to compete. Murphy reflects how in his playing days he had turned down bigger offers to play elsewhere because part of being a Tiger contained something that money could not buy but he acknowledges that much has changed since.
Talk about his contract is the one time that Tuilagi dries up, preferring silence to obfuscation. When asked whether he saw himself as always being a Tiger, his first response was to ask where the questioner was going. Do you think you will always be here? “Yes, absolutely.” And then he is gone.