Every great sporting dynasty hits the buffers at some stage. Brazil football, Wigan rugby league, Australia cricket: a glorious past does not indefinitely protect against awkward modern reality. Leicester, currently putting the “rut” into Rutland, are not the first top team to discover life at the bottom is significantly more stressful.
With five Premiership games to play, they are five points off the foot of the table, with relegation a lurking possibility if their next two games against the leaders, Exeter, and fellow strugglers Newcastle end in defeat. Should a team coached by the former Leicester legend Dean Richards nudge them into the Championship it would be the ultimate east-Midlands nightmare.
Defensively Leicester have been horribly porous, conceding an average of 28 points per game. This week’s hasty hiring of Mike Ford, George’s father, to assist the coach, Geordan Murphy, is a clear indicator of creeping anxiety within the club, with Ford Jr not attempting to sugarcoat the situation. “I’m not surprised we’re in this position,” he says, flatly. “Day in, day out, training and playing, we’ve not been good enough.”
His England colleague Dan Cole does not disagree. In each of Cole’s first five seasons at Welford Road the club made the Premiership final. Last year was the first time they finished outside the top four since the play-off system was introduced; even then they qualified for Europe. When the experienced prop surveys the dressing room he still sees teammates – Ford, Manu Tuilagi, Jonny May – who would be the envy of most sides. “It’s probably part of our problem,” Cole says. “You don’t look around and think: ‘We’re crap.’ You don’t go into games thinking: ‘We’re on for a hiding here because we’re rubbish’ because we’re not. We’ve got good players, we just need to work on the good team part.”
The ever-honest Cole, capped 85 times, has also detected a slight air of complacency. “As a squad you probably assume things will be all right” – and pinpoints one crucial distinction between the modern Tigers and their illustrious predecessors. “When I first came through we used to train for hours. We had really good players, we’d beat each other up in training and it was basically the survival of the fittest. We had Martin Castrogiovanni, Julian White, Alex Moreno and myself, three international looseheads and three top hookers as well. If one broke it was fine because we had two more.
“Tuesdays were as hard as Saturdays because you had two virtual international teams going against each other. Now with modern squad sizes you can’t train like that. As a result we probably don’t train as hard. If you break people you don’t have the depth. You can point your finger at the evolution of the game or the salary cap but that’s the truth of it. You have to adapt, as other teams seem to have done.”
In other words the professional game has left some of Leicester’s traditions behind. Every visiting team to Welford Road used to encounter a Mount Rushmore of craggy, once-in-a-generation forwards; these days the home pack no longer frighten people. It is six years since Leicester were champions of England yet, despite everything, public expectation also remains rooted in the past. “Everything we do dates back to the Johnson and Richards era,” Cole says. “The fans remember the European Cups and we are still anchored to that in some regards.”
A succession of coaches have come and gone to the point where Ford Jr admits the squad have become confused. “There are a few issues. One of the main things is more clarity in the way we are playing, having a better plan from game to game and practising that in the week with great intensity. We’ve not really had bullet-proof clarity that we as players can buy into.”
Once things have started to go awry, according to Ford, the team have been slow to react. “It’s all well and good having a plan but then you get punched in the face and you need to be resilient and clever enough to adjust.”
It feels all the more awkward because Leicester is a club with many good people still at its heart. Murphy is a universally popular figure and, at long last, the academy is producing highly promising cubs. The only missing ingredient is the most important one of all: the old aura that gave Leicester an edge even when they played poorly.
“I was probably spoilt when I was coming through,” Cole says. “You think you’re working hard because even when you’re not at your best you’re still winning games. Now, when you hit a rough patch, it makes you appreciate what previously you almost took for granted. We’re not used to this.”
With two-year-old twin boys to keep him occupied off the field, Cole at least has the priceless asset of perspective in difficult times like this. “The kids don’t care if you’re a rugby player; you can’t take your mood home, you have to leave it in the car.” His maternal grandfather was a miner who broke his back in a pit accident; if the worst does happen to Leicester this season it will still be strictly relative.
That said, if the prospect of Leicester playing away games at Ampthill and Hartpury College next season does not concentrate minds nothing will. “If we carry on as we have been doing, it’s not good enough,” Ford says. For Cole, the trick is not to look beyond Saturday’s game against Exeter, who won the reverse fixture 40-6 in September. “There’s no point looking at the table daily, because it’s not going to change. Whether you’re top or bottom it doesn’t change the fact you want to win every game.”
Rather less familiar is the sense of fear and self-loathing gnawing away at every loyal Tiger before their next two matches, with Ben Youngs out with a shoulder injury and Sione Kalamafoni suspended. “There’s a fine line between being emotionally up for it and being too desperate,” Ford says.
If Leicester’s supposed stars do not ride to the rescue soon, they will be on the night train to the big “adios”.