"They won it comfortably at the end and fair play to them," said Mark Evans, NEC Harlequins head coach at the post match press conference. "But rugby is a game of momentum and when you have the momentum or favour you have to put points on the board and we didn't do that today."

"I thought that they started well, but we got back into it and should have got back to 13-9 to be honest. Then we had a good patch with a good 20 minutes in terms of territory and possession but we didn't capitalise on it at all, so that you then concede a score you are looking at a score of 18 or 20-6 away from home and it is a long way back from there, so I'm disappointed."

"We began poorly, but lost the game in the third quarter, when we had a lot of territory and a lot of possession and we needed to score. We had one or two half chances, missed a couple of drop goals and missed a couple of kicks."

"I thought they wobbled a bit during that first hour and started making mistakes, but we didn't put any points on the board and at seven points behind, as soon as they scored their second try the game was finished."

After landing two penalties to lead 6-3, Leicester eased further in front courtesy of a typical Leicester try from Neil Back following a lineout catch and drive to Martin Johnson, but the home side were given four goes at getting over the line despite Quins halting the moves legally more than once.

"I thought we did stop it twice but the referee disagreed," said Evans dryly. "I thought the second one in particular was okay, but some referees see it differently. Some say that is a tackle, some say that it is collapsing."

"They are good at it - but we are good at it as well when we've got all our personnel in place, but the only time we got one, we made eight metres very late in the game but by that time we had a few subs and we weren't really set-up for it."

"But I'm not complaining - I like a driven maul; it is a thing of beauty."

After opening the season against Gloucester, no team would have chosen to have played Leicester on their own patch, especially when they have never lost their opening league game at Welford Road and not lost a league game there since May 1998.

"It made no difference really, you have to come up here sometime. I thought we had a chance and we did until the end of the third quarter. We were in the game and we let them off the hook a bit," said the Quins boss.

"At 13-9, which is what is should have been, we needed some score at anytime and then come back, and we didn't. The first time that they got down there we slipped a tackle and that was it."

Evans could still take a number of positives from the game though, apart from a stand out performance from young lock Karl Rudzki who looked very comfortable against the England pairing of Martin Johnson and Ben Kay.

"I think there are positives. Last week, ironically, which is always the way, the two arrears that I was very unhappy with last week, I was very happy with today."

"Namely we were very uncompetitive in the tackle area last week and I thought that we were much better in that area today. We slipped off god knows how many one-up tackles last week, and we slipped off one today."

"There were other parts of our game however that fell apart. We scrummed very well last week and we didn't scrum too well today. Our lineout was excellent last week and it was a bit shaky today, but that's the game isn't it?"