GIVEN the amount of money Leicester plough into their front row and pack, I knew it would be a big ask to keep them out when they had that five-metre scrum on our line at the end of the Aviva Premiership game with them on Friday.

Still, they went early before the ball was in. I have been in sitautions like that before when the referee has re-set the scrum five times before awarding a penalty try, so for JP Doyle to twice give Leicester penalty tries on the first offence was really harsh.

I don’t know if he was maybe thinking about Richard Cockerill’s comments in the press about the way Andrew Small refereed their scrum the week before.

We played well for the first 60 minutes, but then we lost our composure — the game was ours for the taking, but we threw it away in the last couple of minutes when we lost our structure in their ‘22’.

There has been a lot of controversy over whether or not it was a penalty try at the end but, for me, the damage was done in their ‘22’ when we let ourselves be turned over.

We had Andy Goode and Josh Drauniniu in the ruck doing the forwards’ job and that is not for them to do.

As a forward, if you see a 10 bridging over the ball, you know you will knock them off it and that’s exactly what Thomas Waldrom did.

Leicester still had a lot to do from there, but it was great, confident play from them to go down the other end so quickly and snatch the victory.

That is what we need to be doing to teams and I spoke to Richard Hill after the Sale game when we lost 33-27 and he made us kick the ball off at the end to ensure we kept the losing bonus point.

I was open in the team meeting after that match and said it was the last play of the game and we needed to throw everything at them one last time.

Sale thought they’d got the game won and we know what can happen when you think like that — you go into passive defence to try not to concede penalties. It was Hilly’s decision for us to kick the ball off, but I wanted to gamble and try to win it at the end.

The Leicester match was a bit of an arm-wrestle because the pitch was so heavy — it was like a sand pit, so I’m not sure what the groundstaff are doing with it at the moment. When we did get the ball out wide, our backs ran some good lines and caused Tigers problems.

With spear tackles, I think it is a bit of a grey area. Was Toby Flood’s tackle on Goodey one or not? I’m not really sure, it’s difficult to say.

With Goodey’s yellow card, Scott Hamilton had already scored the try and Andy slid in with his knees and got sin-binned — it just comes down to discipline.

This weekend we have an Amlin Challenge Cup trip to Italy to play Rovigo, but it’s all but a dead rubber because Perpignan won’t mess up in their last two pool games.

There will be no pressure on us, so we can go there with a relaxed attitude and enjoy the trip after a few really tough matches in the Premiership.