Warriors narrowly miss out on a point at Welford Road (From Worcester News)

Worcester Warriors suffer Aviva Premiership defeat to Leicester Tigers

7:55pm Saturday 8th September 2012 in Sport By Tom Guest, @tomguestWN #WENsport

WORCESTER Warriors are still searching for their first Aviva Premiership win of the season after suffering a 34-26 defeat to Leicester Tigers at Welford Road.

The Sixways side put in a determined shift, but were once again under-mined by key errors at critical stages of the game, including playing a quarter of the match with 14 men due to yellow cards for Chris Pennell and Shaun Perry.

Worcester made a terrible start, conceding two tries in the opening 12 minutes, but showed real fight to cause Leicester, one of the powerhouses of English rugby, several problems throughout the game.

Former Warrior Graham Kitchener was among the Tigers’ try-scorers as they crossed five times to rack up a bonus-point win.

Worcester did show some cutting edge, though, and scored tries of their own through winger David Lemi and centre Alex Grove.

Warriors head coach Richard Hill said: “It was a huge effort on our part and once again I can see that there is something nice building.

“The players are bitterly disappointed with the loss, as they should be, but they know there are signs that the character is building and the play is better than it was last year. There are a lot of positives to take.

“We made the worst possible start by being 14-3 down after 12 minutes and having conceded two tries from when we’d had the ball and were attacking. You wouldn’t expect to lose tries from that distance and that put us on the back foot.

“We had to suffer 10 minutes without Chris Pennell when he was sin-binned, we got him back and then lost Shaun Perry to a yellow card, so the side showed good character to battle back from that.

“We had a desire to play well, showed plenty of ambition and our squad was pretty solid despite having a lot of young lads on the bench.”