Kay seeks pain cure as Cup Final is a chance for revenge on Welsh

Forced to play out of position, he was part of the England team which suffered a spectacular second-half implosion, blowing a 19-6 lead and setting off a cataclysmic chain of events with reverberations still being felt around RFU headquarters 10 weeks later.

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Half of that triumphant Wales pack will be on the Ospreys bench today, dropped after their shock Heineken Cup defeat by Saracens, but Leicester's second successive EDF Energy Cup Final against the Celtic League champions will still be a seismic occasion.

"It's going to be a bit like playing Wales again," admits Kay, the only Tiger in today's team who played in that Six Nations opener.

Through no fault of his own, Kay probably suffered more than most that day, a lock stuck out of place in the back row because England had nobody else to put there after losing first Tom Rees, then Lewis Moody.

Throwing away the match allowed Wales to take the first step towards a Slam which might otherwise have been England's.

"That was how we felt, especially as the tournament went on," said Kay. "We saw the Welsh doing well and we thought: 'That could have been us if we'd won that first game'. It hurt a lot.

"With no fit back-rowers left, I'd got the message about a minute before half-time that I might be going on in the second half in the back row. I had no problems with that. I'd played there earlier in my career so it wasn't a huge worry.

"We had the game in a seemingly winnable position and then gifted the Welsh a lot of opportunities which they took full advantage of. We played totally the wrong style of rugby for periods in that second half.

"Had we played a slightly more negative game that day, we'd have come out on top. Instead, when the ball went behind us, we turned bad ball into worse ball."

Kay's sole concern now is to ensure that Leicester are rather more circumspect. He will be lining up in front of a 62,000 crowd at Twickenham for his eighth club final in eight seasons since joining Leicester from Waterloo on his native Merseyside.

He has lost two Premiership Grand Finals — to Sale in 2006, followed by Wasps 12 months later — and won the remainder, most recently against the Ospreys this time last year.

"They are all massive occasions and this one will be no different," he says. "I'm slightly less nervous than I was going into my first European final in 2001 when I didn't play particularly well.

"This is a final between two teams who have shown potential this season but not quite done what they wanted to do.

"They will be smarting from last week. Even the best sides are capable of a bad day at the office and maybe the Ospreys felt that happened to them last Sunday at Saracens, but we have to worry about our own performance.

"We don't seem to have a consistent rhythm to our game. We know that not to win anything in a season is unacceptable for a club of Leicester's stature and while we're bitterly disappointed to have missed out on Europe, we still have our eyes on retaining this trophy and the Premiership.

"We know the Ospreys will bounce back from last week and that this will be a cracking game."

Last year's crackled along at the rate of almost a point a minute, Leicester exploiting a series of uncharacteristic clangers by former New Zealand veteran Justin Marshall to lead 28-9 with four first-half tries before the Ospreys replied with four of their own and made it a breathlessly close-run thing at 41-35.

While Tom Croft, another Leicester representative from this year's Six Nations, has to make do with playing second fiddle on the bench to Martin Corry, Kay remains an integral part of the Leicester operation at 32, still far from finished as a Test lock despite losing his place to Steve Borthwick.

"I have one more year on my contract and I want to go beyond that," he says. "I'm loving my rugby. I intend to keep going for as long as my body's up to it, maybe for another 10 years."

Typically, he has gone the extra mile, or in his case an extra couple of hundred, to put himself in a winning frame of mind. Kay was at Anfield last Tuesday to witness his native Liverpool beat Arsenal in the Champions League in the company of his old world-beating second row partner, a certain Martin Johnson.

Whatever the rugby gods shower down on the players this afternoon, Kay can draw some comfort from one thing — the Ospreys surely cannot put Leicester in as big a flap as England were in two months ago.