Fans offer to pay Healey fine

Protecting that run from the threat posed by last season?s runners-up had mattered more, said Healey, than being keel-hauled by the Lions management in Dublin for a column in which he described a Wallaby as an ape when it transpired that he not only did not write it, he did not say it.

He said: ?The Lions is history, I?m moving on. Playing for Leicester was more important than attending the disciplinary hearing.?

With a crowd as formidable as the team, something will have to go badly wrong for Leicester to lose. Wasps had neither the ability nor the belief to make anything of reaching half-time one point clear.

They were still only four behind 20 minutes later when Dean Richards abandoned the pre-season plan of holding his ?big guns? back for another fortnight and the crowd inspired them to raise their game.

Healey said: ?It was uplifting knowing that the vast majority of people were right behind me. Maybe it will be different at Gloucester next week but that can wait.? Just as opponents are intimidated at what awaits them once they emerge into the Tigers? lair from beneath the old wooden stand, so Leicester are driven by a fear of losing. Healey said: ?People are desperate to beat us and that means stepping up a couple of gears to make sure they don?t and then the Welford Road factor comes into its own.

?It gives us massive motivation. We?ve won games there we shouldn?t have. Gloucester at home last year being the prime example when all the international players were away.

One of our goals is to go through another season unbeaten at home. If you are going to win the League, that?s what you have to do.

?It?s become something of almost mythical proportion that I?d hate to be in the changing room if we do lose that home record. This is my sixth season at the club and I?ve never lost a League match at Welford Road, I think. That?s tempting fate, isn?t it??

Healey has been there so long that he could be forgiven for forgetting that he did appear in one League defeat, albeit as a substitute wing against Harlequins five seasons ago.

Wasps were never able to use the extra pace offered by Paul Sampson and Josh Lewsey, they ended up collapsing in a heap, substitute hooker Dugald Macer literally so when one of the stretcher bearers carrying him off lost his grip.

Macer?s serious knee damage means he, like Wasps back-row men Lawrence Dallaglio and Richard Birkett, will be out for months.