{"id":23348,"date":"2025-12-13T14:10:27","date_gmt":"2025-12-13T14:10:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/champions-cup-leicester-tigers-15-23-leinster-visitors-fight-back-to-continue-winning-start\/"},"modified":"2025-12-13T14:10:27","modified_gmt":"2025-12-13T14:10:27","slug":"champions-cup-leicester-tigers-15-23-leinster-visitors-fight-back-to-continue-winning-start","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/champions-cup-leicester-tigers-15-23-leinster-visitors-fight-back-to-continue-winning-start\/","title":{"rendered":"Champions Cup: Leicester Tigers 15-23 Leinster &#8211; visitors fight back to continue winning start"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\"><b class=\"ssrcss-1xjjfut-BoldText e5tfeyi3\">Leicester full-back Freddie Steward told BBC Radio 5 Live:<\/b><\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;[The emotion is] disappointment. I think we had enough to win today.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;I don&#8217;t know what it was, we just ran out of steam and our discipline let us down.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;We said at the end in the huddle that if we don&#8217;t believe now that we&#8217;re good enough, then I don&#8217;t know what we need, because that&#8217;s one of the best teams in club rugby in the world and we&#8217;ve gone toe-to-toe with them.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;We can be proud of our fight and our effort, but that&#8217;s not good enough &#8211; we want to go beyond that now. We&#8217;ve got the fight and the effort, now we need to go and win games, but it&#8217;s definitely there, which is good.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\"><b class=\"ssrcss-1xjjfut-BoldText e5tfeyi3\">Tigers head coach Geoff Parling told Premier Sports:<\/b><\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;I&#8217;m proud of the way the group stood up for each other.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;I didn&#8217;t think things went for us in the game. We&#8217;ve just got to learn that when we feel we&#8217;re not getting the calls we deserve, what can we do to really tighten up and be more accurate in what we do?<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;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&#8217;s the difference between winning and losing.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;The young lads I&#8217;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&#8217;re certainly not dead in the competition. There are two games to come and we know how this competition works.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\"><b class=\"ssrcss-1xjjfut-BoldText e5tfeyi3\">Leinster head coach Leo Cullen told Premier Sports:<\/b><\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;I thought we started the game really well with great intent. We had a lot of opportunities but we didn&#8217;t quite take them.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;You have to give the lads a huge amount of credit, it was an unbelievably composed dressing room at half-time.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;It&#8217;s difficult to play here. Leicester are incredibly dogged in everything they do.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;I thought we showed good composure to come away with a win, because it wasn&#8217;t perfect, but the lads managed to find a way to get the scores at important times of the game.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/sport\/rugby-union\/articles\/c0mpppeeedno?at_medium=RSS&#038;at_campaign=rss\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Leicester full-back Freddie Steward told BBC Radio 5 Live: &#8220;[The emotion is] disappointment. I think we had enough to win today. &#8220;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23349,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-rugby"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23348"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23348\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23350,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23348\/revisions\/23350"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}