It’s hard not to sympathise with Marcelo Loffreda.

Even winning the Premiership title on Saturday might not be enough for the Tigers head coach to save his job.

You wonder, after the club’s chief executive’s comments in the papers this week, whether defeat to Wasps would make the job of replacing the Argentine much simpler.

“We will have a review of the coaching staff as we do every year. The result on Saturday will have some relevance,” said Peter Wheeler, perhaps looking to douse the flames after Loffreda himself finally admitted his neck is well and truly on the block.

“It is unfair from one point of view,” he said. “One part of the club just look for results. The other part looks to have some time to adapt, to get used to the place, the culture and a different type of game.

“Both positions are understandable. I am in one position, the other part is in the other position.

“I am very happy what we have done with the team and with the players but it is not my opinion that counts.”

In the seven months he has had in charge of Leicester, Welford Road has been steadily leaking stories about unrest under the Loffreda regime such as players unhappy at the length of meetings held by a coach still grasping fully conversant English, and discomfort with alien tactics to a side used to playing a certain way.

To an extent it’s understandable that a club so steeped in the traditions that have made it the most successful in the country, and one of the best in Europe, is resistant to change.

But that begs the question, why appoint an outsider in the first place?

If continuity has brought so much success to a club, it is a huge risk to bring that trend to an end by looking to a coach with little or no knowledge of the values that have been the building blocks of that eminence, and asking him to carry on where the men before him had left off.

The Leicester way has unquestionably been fruitful, but so were Loffreda’s methods that took a tier two nation to the brink of a World Cup final. The players and staff at the club are plenty experienced enough to have expected him to come and implement his own blueprint, and that making those changes was going to take time, certainly more than the seven months he has had so far.

Victorious or not on Saturday, Loffreda deserves the chance to get a pre-season of preparation under his belt with a group of players he has had little or no chance to get to know.

He would doubtless agree, but, as he says, it is not his opinion that counts.