Iain Sinclair was a young up-and-coming back-row with Glasgow in 1997 when they travelled to Welford Road to take on a star-studded Leicester Tigers outfit. It was in a European Champions Cup quarter-final play-off match and the Scots were defeated 90-19 by a side packed full of internationalists.
With the two clubs meeting again this evening memories of that encounter have been flooding back to Sinclair this week - and despite the scoreline they are not all bad memories. “People often say that you learn more from defeat than you do from victory and I certainly learnt a lot from that loss that I took into the rest of my career,” Sinclair, now 40, recalls.
“In the summer of 1997 I had been lucky enough to captain the Scottish Thistles, a Scottish development squad, on a tour of New Zealand.
“For a lot of us who were quite young and trying to make our way in the game that was an eye opener because it was rugby 24/7 and we were exposed to gym work that we had never seen before.
“It was a brilliant tour and we played some good rugby and got ourselves as fit as we had ever been. I just remember coming off that long spell away and really wanting to kick on with Glasgow and play in Europe.
“In our European pool we managed to finish second behind Wasps and ahead of Swansea and Ulster and that meant that we had to play a play-off to try and make it through to the last eight.
“That play-off was against Leicester and at the time they really were a top, top side. There is no doubt about it, that day they were just better than us in every aspect of the game and I remember coming off the field, aged 21, so angry with myself and the team because we felt like we had let a lot of people down.
“In the cold light of day though I thought about what the Tigers players had done over the 80 minutes to make them so good and I tried to take a lot of those things into the next few months and years to help me be the best player that I could be.”
The Leicester pack that early November day 19 years ago included the likes of Martin Johnson, who was the captain, and Martin Corry who would both go on to become English rugby legends.
In the back row Sinclair, Fergus Wallace and David McLeish were up against Corry and two players - Neil Back and Irishman Eric Miller - who had been on the successful British & Irish Lions tour to South Africa just months before.
“As a number seven I admired the way that Back played the game and wanted to try and pick up as many tips as I could from him. That day I must have made the most tackles that I ever had in a match and that trio of Back, Corry and Miller were very good,” Sinclair, who went on to play for Edinburgh and Scotland ‘A’, said.
“Earlier in that campaign we had also played against the likes of Chris Sheasby and Lawrence Dallaglio for Wasps so for myself it was a great learning curve and I wanted to test myself against these guys.”
In the backs, Leicester were controlled by South African stand-off Joel Stransky and he had a field day against Glasgow, scoring three tries and 10 conversions.
James Craig, Tommy Hayes and Cameron Little scored Glasgow’s tries on a day to forget.
Looking ahead to tonight’s match-up and Sinclair believes that Glasgow's current crop can get their European campaign off to a strong start.
He explained: “Gregor Townsend has become a fine coach and he is such a great thinker on the game.
“The young Scottish players he has in his team are maturing all of the time and can be relied on in the big matches.
“It is going to be some atmosphere at Scotstoun and I think they have it within their ranks to win this game. The performance will set the tone for their European efforts this year so I expect the players to come out firing.”
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