Farewell Cole and Youngs: Leicester Tigers will miss two fine servants

Perhaps the highest praise you can give to one-club players is that when the time arrives to say goodbye, when their bodies are telling them the gig is up even if their minds insist they can keep going, you can hardly imagine their team without them.

Win or lose, Leicester had a ­number of tough goodbyes to make after Saturday’s Gallagher Premiership final.

To Michael Cheika, head coach for only a season but exactly the kind of world-class operator Leicester needed to redirect a ship that had veered off course. To Julian Montoya, their outstanding hooker and captain, the kind of industrious and passionate player who immediately made sense as a Leicester signing. To Mike Brown, now 39 and still restlessly banging on Cheika’s door to get a game in his final season.

None of those farewells will have been easy. Saying goodbye to Dan Cole and Ben Youngs, however, is on another level. Where do you begin with two ­players who in Saturday’s Premiership final defeat against Bath marked their 343rd and 338th appearances for Leicester respectively. Cole is now 38, Youngs 35, and it feels like the right time.

Youngs toyed with a further ­season at Leicester and looked at moves abroad both in France and Japan. But the image of him sniping around rucks in the French second division does not seem right. Youngs clearly felt the same.

“It’s all I have known in club rugby, the green, red and white, and all I’ve wanted to know,” Youngs said when announcing his retirement. “The idea of playing against this club wasn’t ever an option for me and so, for me to be able to finish a one-club player will be one of my greatest achievements.”

Given that Youngs won multiple Six Nations with England and league titles with Leicester, and a series with the British and Irish Lions back in 2013, that is not a statement to be taken lightly. His role in two of England’s best tries from the 2010s, Chris Ashton’s at home to Australia and Manu Tuilagi’s in the World Cup semi-final against New Zealand, should not be forgotten either.

Grouping Cole and Youngs together is not meant to diminish their individual achievements. The pair have emerged as quite the ­double act in the final chapter of their ­playing careers, launching a podcast with ‘For The Love of Rugby’ which in an extremely crowded market has managed to stand out. Youngs as a podcaster always made sense; lively, confident, usually caught smiling or cracking a joke with a degree of warmth which leaves you wanting to be his mate.

Cole, on the other hand, has been something of a media revelation. Often responding to interviews throughout his career with a bit of a flat bat while hinting at a dry sense of humour, on their podcast that side of Cole has flourished. Other successful podcasts featuring ex-players have come before them and broken fresh ground, including ‘The Good, The Bad and The Rugby’ featuring Mike Tindall, busy of late trying to guide rugby into a new era with R360.

Cole and Youngs, even in a short space of time since launching last year, have taken the template and ­created an excellent version of their own, playing off each other with the kind of ease you develop naturally having run out alongside each other for two decades.

Cole, like Youngs, reached rugby’s summit only to fall narrowly short of World Cup glory with England in 2019. There was a period where you worried for England if Cole was not on the field to anchor the scrum. Like all great props, his best work was done in the shadows. Eddie Jones’ defence of Cole back in 2016 is worth noting. “We wouldn’t have any other tighthead in our team.”

Both players came off their bench for their farewell, their names during the team announcement greeted with louder roars than anyone else, hoping to play their part in Leicester’s second Premiership title in four years. By the time they came on, cheered raucously by Leicester and Bath fans alike – was that Cole being brought on at tighthead or Taylor Swift? – Leicester were almost adrift.

The decision to then yellow card Cole for a late charge on Finn Russell was met with such a deluge of boos you wondered if there might be a riot. Cole shook his head, and left. If we are ranking final acts in a rugby career, clattering into the British and Irish Lions fly-half is some way to say goodbye. How could you not be moved by the sight after the final whistle of Cole crying into the arms of his former team-mate Tom Croft?

It is worth remembering that Leicester finished last season in eighth place. For Cole and Youngs to have left at that point with the club in disarray would have been wrong. Even in defeat at Twickenham, both players deserved to bow out on the grandest of stages after remarkable careers for club and country. How Leicester will miss them.