Captain marvel - More Welsh heroics at HQ as Ospreys are too tough for Leicester

No winning Welsh team had heard Bread of Heaven reverberate round HQ for 20 years until February and Jones has now presided over two triumphant sing-songs in rapid succession.

When it comes to being impeccably qualified to lead the best of British and Irish in South Africa next year, he is in a class all by himself. The ultimate individual prize in European rugby will not be formally announced for 12 months but the newly-crowned Anglo-Welsh winners of the EDF Energy trophy consider it to be a foregone conclusion.

"For me, Ryan is already captain of the Lions," said Ospreys' head coach Lyn Jones. "His captaincy has been fantastic. He is hard on himself and hard on everyone else — a leader who demands high standards."

For his next trick, in South Africa at the end of the season, Jones will attempt to give the Springboks a taste of what awaits them, Wales' two June Tests offering him a dummy run. All he has to do is negotiate the treacherous equivalent of jumping Becher's Brook 30 times between now and then for his namesake's prediction to come true.

"No pressure then, Lyn," he said. "No, seriously, it's very good to know that he holds me in such high esteem. I've got to stay fit and perform to the best of my ability and, if I get the call, it will be fantastic.

"The Lions captaincy is probably the greatest accolade in Northern Hemisphere rugby but I'm still learning.

"I have a lot of work to do. My rugby is improving, I am growing into the captaincy role and the biggest accolade is when the crucial decisions are to be made and the players turn to me to make them.

"It's fantastic that they respect me to that extent. Captaincy is about doing it your way and great captains are those who endure a lot of different experiences. After everything I've been through with the various operations, believe me, I take nothing for granted."

For one who had never played a game of rugby until he was 17, Jones has made gigantic strides to compensate. In three years he has gone from an after-thought for the last Lions tour to the prospective main man.

He has also sampled the best and worst of what the game has to offer, from seeing the ill-fated Celtic Warriors go bust to suffering the broken shoulder which wiped him out of the entire Six Nations last year. And there was also the not-sosmall matter of his Ospreys being put to flight by Saracens when they ought to have had Europe at their mercy.

Outplaying a team of Leicester's calibre merely emphasised the magnitude of the opportunity missed at Watford six days earlier. "My biggest ambition with the Ospreys is to crack Europe," said Jones. "It's a title we need to win and one we are more than capable of winning."

The game at large had better get used to their doing so. The Ospreys are different, not just because they plan to increase their monopoly of the Wales squad next season from 14 to 18 but because they are driven by a siege mentality, a chippy 'nobody-likes-us' attitude.

"We get kicked in the pants for having ambition,' said Jones, whose coaching position will now surely no longer be in question. 'People say we have bought a team but we've done nothing of the sort. Fifteen of the 22 out there came through the Ospreys system."

Ospreys subjected Leicester to more than a beating. They made the most powerful club in England look second-rate.

The Tigers have had bad days at Twickenham before, most notably against Wasps in the European Cup Final last May but never one like this when they were made to look as desperately one-dimensional and pedestrian. Among the more forgettable contributions was that of Aaron Mauger, a world-beater in his previous guise as an All Black but unable to provide inspiration for a team desperately short of it.

Apart from the heroics of uncapped Irishman Johne Murphy at full back and Jordan Crane's periodic charges at No 8, Leicester barely raised a threat. On this form, with 12 defeats during a season when they have not won three Premiership matches in a row since last September, their title defence will not go into next month's play-offs.

Lose at Bath tomorrow night and they will be further adrift of the top four with games running out. Head coach Marcelo Loffreda can only hope that this was a case of his team being too bad to be true.