My Leicester team-mates step out at Twickenham this Saturday to take on the Ospreys in the EDF Cup final - and for the second successive year I won’t be involved.

It’s a repeat of last year’s final which we won in a thrilling contest, but yet again injury has ruled me out of the big occasion and to say I am gutted is an understatement.

An operation on my ruptured Achilles is going to sideline me for four to five months, so my season is over, and all I can do is support my team-mates as a very, very frustrated spectator and hope they can win the first silverware of the season.

I’m not a great watcher of rugby at the best of times, but nevertheless I shall be at Twickenham on Saturday in the commentary box, providing ‘expert’ analysis for Radio Five Live.

I have done some commentating before but not for a long time and I’m looking forward to it. I just want to concentrate on not getting too excited or swearing down the microphone if the Tigers do well or badly. I will of course attempt to be impartial but it’s going to be tough.

Not as tough as the challenge my Leicester team-mates face, however. The Ospreys are a very good side and there’s always extra spice when you face a Welsh team, and particularly this year because the Ospreys were knocked out of theHeineken Cup quarter-finals by Saracens last week and they well be desperate to bounce back.

The Ospreys, are stacked full of internationals and they were heavily fancied to make a clean sweep of trophies this year so that defeat last week would have hurt. They will also be keen for revenge after we beat them in the final last year and eager to prove why they should have won.

Last year’s game was a strange one. We played really well in the first half and built up a sizeable lead by half time; the Ospreys came on really strong in the second half but left themselves too much to do by the end.. But it was one hell of a tough game.

Their defeat to Saracens last week would have been a bit of a wake up call for them and they will be determined to put that right on Saturday. I’ve heard their captain Ryan Jones talking about their desire to avenge the defeat last season so it clearly means a lot to them and we are under no illusions about the size of the task ahead.

The EDF Cup final has become a special day in the domestic club calendar. In the early days of the competition it wasn’t high on the priority list of most clubs, it would be fair to say. It was a bonus to play at Twickenham if you got to the final, but generally clubs would rest their first choice players and the tournament was not considered nearly as important as the Premiership or the Heineken Cup.

There’s more attention drawn to it now, it’s obviously a big competition which will be reflected in the size of the crowd at Twickenham on Saturday.

It will be nice to win the competition back to back and get our Argentinian coach Marcelo Loffreda his first piece of silverware at Welford Road. And we have a great opportunity to do it.