Skivington's brutal admission about the rest of Gloucester's season

Gloucester head coach George Skivington accepted that it would now be extremely difficult for his side to make the end-of-season play-offs after seeing them crash to a 26-5 defeat at the hands of Leicester at Kingsholm.

Gloucester had much the better of the first 50 minutes in terms of possession and territory but they crucially failed to take advantage of a sin-binning for Tigers wing Harry Potter.

The game was still scoreless after 55 minutes before Leicester, aided by two yellow cards for Lewis Ludlow and Jonny May, seized control to record a vital victory and retain the Ed Slater Cup.

Their tries came from Mike Brown, Julian Montoya, Ben Youngs and Jasper Wiese, with Handre Pollard adding three conversions as they recorded a sixth consecutive victory over Gloucester and their 14th in the last 17 fixtures between the clubs.

Gloucester’s sole response was a May try, with this defeat a bitter blow to their play-off aspirations as they are now nine points adrift of fourth-placed Northampton with Saints having played a game more.

Skivington said: “It’s a big loss for us and makes it extremely difficult but I don’t think we should be talking about the play-offs but more about playing better.

“We wanted to make a statement for Ed (Slater) and I think we did that in terms of physicality, effort and work-rate but we just weren’t clinical enough.

“I thought we played really well in the first half and actually created more than I thought we would.

“We were camped on their line for a good while but just couldn’t score as Leicester are very tight-knit in defence.

“We didn’t see the ball in the second half or get a foothold and the boys they brought on really made an impact.

“We made mistakes and they punished us, which we didn’t do to them in the first half.

“Matias Alemanno was ill in the week but battled on and Albert Tuisue tore his hamstring within minutes of coming on but we are not making excuses on that front.”

It was Leicester’s fourth league victory in succession, which took them back up to the third in the Premiership table, and with their three remaining games at home, they are in pole position for a play-off spot.

Their interim head coach Richard Wigglesworth said: “We will take loads of positives from that performance, especially our heroic defence in the second quarter which allowed us to go in at half-time all square when we should have been behind.

“We were then able to address a number of first-half issues to enable us to dominate the second half.

“I’m surprised no kicks at goal were taken from penalties but they backed their driving maul to score and we managed to keep that out.

“We just came to win the game but when the late opportunity came for a bonus point, we were able to take it and hopefully the three home games to come will be of benefit to us.”