The 29-year-old made his first appearance of the season in club colours having returned home from the Rugby World Cup in France following Ireland’s disappointing exit at the pool stages of the competition.
“We knew it was going to be a very difficult game against Gloucester,” said Murphy. “They are a quality side and they’ve been playing some really good rugby so we knew it was going to be tough for us. The guys had been performing quite well in the first three games and we’d had some good wins, but we knew that wasn’t going to be enough and that we’d have to up our game. Gloucester’s defence was very good and it was very difficult to break it down. Unfortunately, we were chasing the game for a large part of it and it just didn’t happen for us.”
Despite the defeat, Murphy was clearly pleased to be back in a Tigers shirt.
“It was good to be back with the lads. I only trained a couple of days last week so, for me, the big thing was getting the calling patterns right and trying not to call them by last year’s moves. There’s a lot of new faces but they seem to really have the Leicester spirit. It’s probably been 10 weeks that I was away, what with training and the World Cup. And it’s tough trying to get back into things, but the boys have been great.”
