COVENTRY RFC travel to Leicester Tigers tomorrow (Saturday, 3pm) in the Premiership Cup.
The match comes on the back of the team extending their winning start to the season to six games with a hard-earned 34-15 victory at Nottingham in the same competition last Friday.
In a match dominated by the referee’s whistle, Nottingham had replacement winger Aman Johal sent off while Cov backs David Opoku and Josh Barton received yellow cards as Mr Wigley lost patience with the soaring penalty count.
With fly-half Liam Richman and full back Steff Davies both also forced from the field by injury, the Blue-and-Whites had to adapt their back-line.
The flow of the contest was badly interrupted by the referee’s whistle with the scrum being a particular problem area. Cov gave away 17 penalties and Nottingham a similar amount, leading to 30 stoppages during the game.
Charlie Robson and Matt Johnson touched down for first-half tries as Cov led 12-3 at half-time. Ryan Hutler, who replaced Jimmy Martin after the latter felt a twinge in his calf during the warm-up, claimed a trademark poacher’s try after the break, and Jordon Poole extended the lead
Bluecoat School product David, who was not originally part of Cov’s match day 23, arrived from the bench to add a fifth try and then created
Will Lane’s late score during an impressive second-half contribution.
Coventry head coach Alex Rae was happy to leave Lady Bay with five points ahead of Saturday’s difficult trip to Welford Road.
He added: “Overall I’m really pleased with the win as Nottingham have been going really well.
“I thought we could have scored a few more tries before half-time and the score was closer than it should have been for a long time because of that.
“We then had to adapt to having quite a few players in different positions and lots of different half-backs and I thought the lads did that really well.”
