Wasps 16 Leicester Tigers 13

One by one Wasps’ exhausted players collapsed to the floor as referee Tom Foley blew the final whistle that signalled the end of Leicester’s 15-game winning run. Missing 16 players, including two withdrawals on the morning of the match, Wasps had given everything in a second-half defensive stand that grew progressively tenser.

The key period came in the final ten minutes when Leicester won three penalties against a Wasps scrum featuring 21-year-old Zac Nearchou playing just his third Premiership match. With a yellow card burning a hole in his pocket, Foley adjudged the next two scrum collapses as resets before finally the ball was played. 

Ben Youngs, as scrum halves tend to do, darted for the line but found himself tackled and then enveloped by the monster arms of Alfie Barbeary. Now officially a flanker, Barbeary had been growing steadily into the game and now delivered the type of X-factor moment that may make him irresistible to England head coach Eddie Jones when he selects his Six Nations squad next week. “He is going to come up with big moments,” Lee Blackett, the Wasps head coach, said. “There’s still a bit to work on in his game. I think there’s a better player still there but he comes up with big moments and that’s why we feel his best position is in that back row.”

There was still three minutes and 30 seconds to see out and what few whole nails left remaining at the Coventry Building Society Arena were chewed up in that time. Inch by inch Leicester crept up field before Kini Murimurivalu knocked on and Brad Shields tore up field, no doubt to considerable annoyance of his exhausted teammates.