Pat Phibbs is an Australian scrum-half who has signed for the Leicester Tigers ahead of the 2012-13 season.

Phibbs spent six seasons with Canberra's ACT Brumbies and has also had spells with London Saracens and the Exeter Chiefs.

Sports Mole spoke to Phibbs about how he is getting on at his new club.

How are you settling in at the Tigers?
"Yeah, I'm loving it at the moment. It was good for me knowing Julian Salvi and Matt O'Connor. Having a couple of familiar faces made the transition a lot easier. From the blokes that are here you can see why it is so easy for guys to improve. It's such a good system with open arms for everyone, so it's been great so far."

Have the pre-season preparations been positive for you?
"Pre-season's always the tough part of the year, you always just want to get into the season. From my point of view I'm making progress on my fitness and strength and getting to know the way Leicester play."

Leicester Tigers are renowned for a hard-knuckle approach to training. Have you noticed a difference in the Leicester ethos to previous clubs?
"I certainly have. Thank God I'm a back as the forwards give a fair bit of stick to each other and Cockers drives them really hard! That's probably one of their strengths, it plays out for them and it's been working over the years so I'm sure they'll keep pushing on with it."

Leicester have gone a couple of seasons without a league or European trophy now. Are you hopeful for some silverware this season?
"You'd like to hope so. For a club of this standard they have very high expectations so of course they'd like to push to go one better than last year. We'd definitely like to see an improvement in the Heineken Cup and I'm sure theres a bit of a burning fire within the guys who were in the Premiership final last year."

There has been a bit of talk about rugby adapting some coaching techniques from the the Olympics. Have you noticed any changes?
"Hopefully not from the Australian point of view because we didn't do too well! It's very rugby-specific here so I dont think there's been too much adapting. The guys have just been training really hard in the pre-season to get fit and ready for the start next week."