Captain Murphy

Geordan Murphy returns to lead out Leicester Tigers in the top-of-the-table encounter with Harlequins on Saturday.

The teams occupying first and second place in the Aviva Premiership Rugby table meet at the Twickenham Stoop in the penultimate round of league fixtures.

Skipper Murphy missed Leicester’s bonus-point win at Northampton last weekend but is fit to resume at Quins in the only change to the starting line-up.

Second-rower Graham Kitchener comes in for Craig Newby among the replacements and Scott Hamilton provides cover in the backline.

“We’ve got a tough run-in but we started that with a win in a very difficult game at Northampton last weekend and now we go to Quins before the last round against Bath,” said Tigers director of rugby Richard Cockerill. “Harlequins have proved themselves over the course of a long season – they won at Welford Road, they beat Toulouse in Europe and they beat Saracens at Wembley just a few weeks ago, so they are still going well.

“We’ve been playing well too, we’ve got ourselves into a good position now and we are still going hard for a place in the semi-finals.”

Starting XV:
15 Geordan Murphy (C)
14 Horacio Agulla
13 Manusamoa Tuilagi
12 Anthony Allen
11 Alesana Tuilagi
10 Toby Flood
9 Ben Youngs
1 Marcos Ayerza
2 George Chuter
3 Dan Cole
4 George Skivington
5 Geoff Parling
6 Tom Croft
7 Julian Salvi
8 Thomas Waldrom

Replacements
16 Tom Youngs
17 Logovi’i Mulipola
18 Martin Castrogiovanni
19 Graham Kitchener
20 Steve Mafi
21 Sam Harrison
22 Billy Twelvetrees
23 Scott Hamilton