SO DID the Leicester Tigers get lost somewhere down the M1? There was a team dressed in green and white at Twickenham yesterday rumoured to be them, but nobody could tell for sure.

They didn’t scrum like the Tigers, they didn’t pass or kick like the Tigers and they certainly didn’t fight like the Tigers. Any resemblance to the dominant English club side of the past decade, and the reigning Guinness Premiership champions, was purely coincidental. Their hooker, George Chuter, even tried a reverse pass midway through the second half, with predictable consequences. That was the extent of their identity crisis.

So the chorus of praise for the Ospreys, who deservedly won their first major trophy in their short, but eventful, history and became the first Welsh club to win the EDF Energy Cup, was largely drowned out by the lament for the soul of a great club.

Nothing should obscure a sweet moment for the five-year-old Welsh franchise, a controversial moulding of Neath and Swansea, who exacted revenge for their defeat by Leicester at Twickenham a year ago. But long before the end of a scrappy, deeply unsatisfactory match, Leicester were trying to save themselves from humiliation. The home of rugby used to be a second home for Leicester; yesterday it seemed like their morgue.

Typically, Martin Corry, who as England captain had to endure some torrid press conferences, did not try to hide the truth behind the Tigers’ dismal display. “We have to look at how we were in attack, how we were in defence, at the breakdown, everywhere,” said the Leicester captain. “We underperformed in every facet of the game.”

When a club like Leicester falls, they do so from such a great height. It’s not as if the former club of Dean Richards and Martin Johnson has dominated elsewhere; they are out of the top four in the Guinness Premiership and have to rescue a season heading rapidly into a vortex at Bath’s Recreation Ground on Tuesday night.

In a sense, that match is their cup final. They certainly played as if their minds were elsewhere. A season without a trophy? “I don’t know if it is acceptable or not, sometimes these things happen,” said Marcelo Loffreda, the Argentine coach whose head is now very much on the block. “It is not good to look at the past.” Just as well, on yesterday’s showing. The past was another country.

Remarkably, Leicester were still in touch when their hooker tipped the balance irrevocably the way of the Ospreys. Step forward Chuter, who will replay the moment 100 times and still wonder what the hell he was trying to do in flipping a pass behind him to the lock, Louis Deacon, who, unsurprisingly, dropped it. Ospreys were able to clear their lines after a long period of Tigers pressure and Deacon hauled himself to his feet and would have been forgiven for grabbing his hooker by the throat in time-honoured Tigers fashion.

When Leicester forwards resort to the fancy stuff, at 7-6 down and on the back foot, then it is time for a once successful club to re-examine some basic tenets of their greatness. It was as well for Chuter that Johnson retired a few seasons back or the poor little fellow might have found himself shipped off to Harlequins, where they appreciate such creativity.

Nobody in the Richards-Johnson era would have contemplated such a manouevre — complete with eye roll and feint — in the centre, let alone the forwards. When Loffreda talked grandly about changing the culture at Welford Road, that was probably not what he had in mind.

But the confusion was not lost on the Ospreys, who might have a fancy-dan reputation of their own to live down, but have enough nous to read the messages of a hooker performing handstands. The Ospreys came to Twickenham with a point to prove, several points, as a matter of fact. One was the growing feeling outside the parish boundaries of Neath and Swansea that this new Ospreys franchise was high on flash and low on substance. Converted to the red of Wales, as they were on a memorable day at Twickenham at the start of the Six Nations, the Ospreys were transformed into a team of warriors.

Faced with the more humble surroundings of Vicarage Road, Watford, last weekend in the Heineken Cup quarter-final against Saracens, they collapsed in a heap. What? No red carpet? Suddenly a season alive with promise on all fronts was reduced to a single fixture, a repeat of last year’s EDF Energy Cup final at Twickenham against Leicester. It was time for the Ospreys to stand up and be counted in a currency worth more than shillings and pence.

A Tigers side of old would have taken one look at the suntan and hair gel content and dumped the pretty boys into Row Z.

Instead, the Ospreys dug deep into their psyche and produced a performance that, well, Leicester on a better day would have recognised. In Marty Holah, they had the game’s outstanding player at flanker, and in James Hook the best kicker and the most elusive runner at fly-half.

Their front row took not one step backwards and Lee Byrne, one of the outstanding players in the Six Nations, was instrumental for the key try of the match, scored by Alun Wyn Jones just after half-time. Had they managed to get Shane Williams into the game for more than the odd moment, the Ospreys would surely have inflicted a far heavier defeat on the woeful defending champions.

In the midst of the rubble, only Harry Ellis remained standing. As he lined up to clap the winners off the field, the England scrum-half could barely look either his opponents or his own side in the eye. He had spent 10 months recovering from a knee ligament injury, conjuring up images of an occasion such as this to help him through the rehabilitation, but when it came he was like the boy on the burning deck.

England have missed his energy and wit; Leicester have missed it more and though Ellis is still short of his old form, he still earned the pats on the back accorded him by his demoralised teammates at the end.

His opposite number, Justin Marshall, had ghosts of his own to lay. Last year he had endured a nightmare final. “I seemed to dig myself deeper and deeper into a hole,” said the New Zealander.

Marshall juggled his first ball, held on to it and found his way out of the void. “It was a breakthrough result for us, the time when we grew up,” said Lyn Jones, the Ospreys coach. Not for the first time this year, Twickenham resounded to a Welsh anthem.