Leicester coach Richard Cockerill has made his charges abandon airs and graces and get dirty in an intense season-build-up. The Sunday Telegraph's Paul Ackford reports.
"Trust the champions. They may be the richest, best-supported club in the country, they may have won back-to-back Premiership titles, but when it comes to a venue for a pre-season training camp, it's grit they want rather than glitz and glamour. If anything should send shivers of apprehension cascading across the league, it is what Leicester got up to in order to get into the mood to defend their title.
"We're very basic here," said Richard Cockerill, Leicester's director of rugby, a three-year contract extension tucked sweetly away in his back pocket.
"We don't spend £70,000 going to La Manga or Brown's [on the Algarve, a favourite venue of England's in the past]. We went to Brive to a very ordinary boot camp and we worked very hard. We trained three times a day and it was pretty boring. I didn't want any distractions. I just wanted to worry about rugby and our boys did that very well."
"So far, so unspectacular. Most clubs opt to get down and dirty pre-season. Some run up slag heaps, others enlist the military to put them through their paces. But this is Leicester, an institution which puts character, attitude and good people ahead of ability, so they went that little bit further, to the other side, the smelly side of manky."
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