Dan McKellar prepared to ‘adapt and learn’ after Leicester Tigers’ ‘really’ disappointing season

Dan McKellar is prepared to “adapt and learn” in his quest for improvement at Leicester Tigers after a disappointing first season in charge of the Premiership outfit.

After lifting the Premiership title under the guidance of current England head coach Steve Borthwick in 2022, Leicester have battled since McKellar took over the coaching reins.

Experienced coach

McKellar worked as the Brumbies’ head coach from 2018 to 2022 and also served as the Wallabies’ assistant coach until 2023 before leaving the latter position to take up his role at the Tigers.

Leicester’s 2023/24 season has seen them losing to Gloucester in the Premiership Cup final, exiting the Investec Champions Cup at the round-of-16 stage and they are currently in eighth position in the Premiership standings.

That means they will not qualify for the tournament’s play-offs as there is just one round of matches left of the regular season and the 47-year-old admitted that he is “really disappointed” with how things have turned out.

“I knew coming here that it is a very different competition to Super Rugby, so we had to train and I had to make sure my approach was what was require for this group and this competition, but we haven’t got that right – we have fallen away at the back end of games when we should be storming home,” McKellar told the BBC.

“If we did that, then we would certainly be playing in a couple of weeks’ time.”

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Leicester have battled recently and lost six of their past seven matches in all competitions since returning to action in mid-March after a break to accommodate the Six Nations.

Prior to that, they were in the hunt for three trophies after winning nine out of 12 matches.

“Since the Six Nations we hit the brakes,” McKellar said.

“After 23 weeks on the bounce, we built quite a bit of momentum and for whatever reason, and we will dig and find out, we haven’t got it right since then.”

Tigers have ‘done a lot of learning’

The Tigers’ Premiership hopes were ended when they suffered a narrow 21-19 home defeat against Bristol Bears at the end of April and McKellar admitted that they have done “a lot of learning as a group”.

“It’s a new coaching group, I’m new to this club, new to this competition, and as I’ve said in the past, things I do well is I’ll listen and adapt and I’ll make sure we are not sitting here in eighth position in 12 months’ time,” McKellar said.

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