Cup campaign was a success - Deacon

COACH PROUD OF YOUNGSTERS’ EFFORT

BRETT Deacon revealed his own coaching aspiration as he labelled Leicester Tigers’ Premiership Rugby Cup campaign a success despite falling short of reaching the final.

Tigers used the competition to blood players as young as 17 and to give game time to those on the fringes of first team squads, winning three of their four pool stage games to set-up a semi-final showdown with London Irish on Tuesday night.

A young and inexperienced side at the Brentford Community Stadium shipped nine tries in a 59-20 defeat as the Exiles progressed to the final to face either Gloucester or Worcester Warriors.

With head coach Steve Borthwick stepping back, Deacon led Tigers for all five Premiership Rugby Cup games on the next step of his coaching journey that started with the club’s academy upon his retirement from playing in 2013.

“We’ve learned a lot through this whole competition,” the 40-year-old told BBC Radio Leicester.

“We’re a club that constantly looks at ways to improve and get better.

“Steve (Borthwick) drives that from the front, that’s infectious from me as a young coach, and a coach that’s aspiring to be a head coach and to lead a team.

“The whole campaign we’ve looked at how we’re going to improve and how we’re going to get better.”

Tigers conceded five tries in the first half and four more in the second of what proved to be the most comprehensive of their six defeats from 32 games in all competitions this season.

“If you look at this game in isolation, it would be unfair,” said Deacon.

“I think we need to look at the whole campaign and say that it has actually been a success. It’s the first time in five years that the club has been in a (domestic) semi-final. That’s a positive.

“We were a more inexperienced team, they (London Irish) had a very experienced team, they had a very good forward pack, that’s a Premiership forward pack.

“They overpowered us in collisions, they got the upper hand around the lineout maul, they got the upper hand around the scrum and we know and the players know that if you don’t get parity or dominance in your maul, or in your scrum, or in your collision, you’re not going to win rugby games.

“It will be a good lesson for us to learn around how we improve them physically to win collisions and win setpiece.”

On their way to the last four of the competition, Tigers defeated London Irish 41-26 at Mattioli Woods Welford Road in March and 16 members of that squad featured again in Tuesday night’s heavy loss.

The Exiles had just 12 players from that pool stage head-to-head with Tigers.

“We will learn a lot from the experience,” said Deacon, right.

“What we’ve done is we’ve stuck to what we set out to achieve, to use a developing team that’s going to be young, that’s going to be inexperienced, and we’re going to throw everything at it and just see where we get to in the competition. We got to a semi-final.

“We played London Irish a couple of weeks ago, they played a similar team, a development team, and we won convincingly.

“This time around, because it’s a semi-final, they’ve changed their team, they’ve gone strong.

“So I think it puts us in good stead long-term because our young players will learn a lot from that.

“We will chunk it right down, we will get to the nitty-gritty of what we need to learn and get better from it and these players will learn.”