Champions Cup: Leicester Tigers 15-23 Leinster – visitors fight back to continue winning start
Leicester full-back Freddie Steward told BBC Radio 5 Live:
“[The emotion is] disappointment. I think we had enough to win today.
“We talked in the week about belief, being aggressive and taking the game to them and I think we did that in the first half. We executed our game plan brilliantly and had the lead at half-time with two moments of magic.
“I don’t know what it was, we just ran out of steam and our discipline let us down.
“We said at the end in the huddle that if we don’t believe now that we’re good enough, then I don’t know what we need, because that’s one of the best teams in club rugby in the world and we’ve gone toe-to-toe with them.
“We can be proud of our fight and our effort, but that’s not good enough – we want to go beyond that now. We’ve got the fight and the effort, now we need to go and win games, but it’s definitely there, which is good.”
Tigers head coach Geoff Parling told Premier Sports:
“I’m proud of the way the group stood up for each other.
“I didn’t think things went for us in the game. We’ve just got to learn that when we feel we’re not getting the calls we deserve, what can we do to really tighten up and be more accurate in what we do?
“We had 37% territory in that game, so we played a lot in our half. I thought we defended so well for each other, but you saw at the top level of the game that one little moment where a ball kicks out of a scrum, that’s the difference between winning and losing.
“The young lads I’ve got here continue to surprise me with the way they work for each other and step up. As long as we learn from what we doing, we’re certainly not dead in the competition. There are two games to come and we know how this competition works.”
Leinster head coach Leo Cullen told Premier Sports:
“I thought we started the game really well with great intent. We had a lot of opportunities but we didn’t quite take them.
“You have to give the lads a huge amount of credit, it was an unbelievably composed dressing room at half-time.
“It’s difficult to play here. Leicester are incredibly dogged in everything they do.
“I thought we showed good composure to come away with a win, because it wasn’t perfect, but the lads managed to find a way to get the scores at important times of the game.”
