Leicester failed to record the expected bonus point win because of a mixture of their blunders and the tenacity of a Newcastle team who belied their lowly place by staging some heroic defence, especially in the second half. The teams turned round locked at 10-10 and Leicester needed to build ferocious periods of pressure to gain the winning tries from the centre Peter Betham and No8 Laurence Pearce in the second half.
A big crowd of 21,564 departed debating how Leicester scored only three tries and had two more disallowed in a hectic first half which highlighted the influence of the TV match official and the big screen.
After Newcastle had darted into a 10-0 lead, thanks to a try from the No8 Nili Latu and the goal-kicks of Craig Willis, on his Premiership debut, Leicester’s Telusa Veainu and Mat Tait had tries disallowed for failing to ground the ball correctly.
The referee, Tim Wigglesworth, angered the home support by insisting on checking both scores after Freddie Burns had lined up conversion attempts. They were close calls and in real time the referee would have awarded the scores, but in the age of big screens and replays, tries are regularly reviewed. To this neutral he made the correct call, even if it took him a couple of minutes to make up his mind.
The most unfortunate aspect was that it denied Leicester a glorious score for Veainu, who caught Ben Youngs’ magnificent, pinpoint cross-field kick. However, after several replays Wigglesworth, helped by the TV official Kitt Rowan, could not be persuaded that Veainu had grounded the ball correctly.
Though Veainu made up by scoring quickly after his blundered attempt, Tait continued the saga by repeating the mistake when bursting clear, off Matt Smith’s lovely flip pass, in the 34th minute. The decisions left Richard Cockerill, Leicester’s director of rugby, frustrated at the mistakes but also at the decision-making process.
Cockerill felt Wigglesworth should have been more assertive and could have ignored the advice of the TV official. “We will take the win but we were pretty ordinary,” he said, before going into detail about the Tait effort, which provoked the biggest debate.
He explained: “I’ve watched it on my computer and on the big screen and you could give it either way. It used to be that the attacking team got the benefit of the doubt but now it’s the defence who get the benefit of the doubt.
“I could not really tell, but that’s why you have the big screen and it’s for the official to make a decision because he’s the referee. With all respect to the guy in the van outside, there’s a reason he’s out there and not in the middle of the field.”
Once Leicester had levelled through Veainu’s try, there was never any danger of a defeat. The biggest surprise was that they were incapable of turning pressure into points.
Newcastle deserved a losing bonus point for their efforts and finished the day bottom following London Irish’s surprise win over Northampton. Tigers remain in third place and travel to Saracens on Saturday.
