Fortress Welford Road falls to craft of Contepomi

Leicester 13 Bristol 27

The Tigers' club record 42-match winning run at home came to an end, but precious few were around to mourn its passing. The Leicester public are no mugs and with more than 20,000 of them heading to Cardiff next week for the Heineken Cup final, less than a quarter of that number were prepared to fork out any more cash to attend this Zurich Championship quarter-final.

Bristol were, according to their director of rugby Dean Ryan, "ecstatic" at taking maximum advantage of Leicester having Munster on their minds. Having registered their second win over the champions inside a fortnight – they beat an under-strength Tigers at the Memorial Stadium in the penultimate round of Premiership matches – Bristol can now qualify for the Heineken Cup for the first time if they beat London Irish or Northampton in the play-off semi-final in two weeks' time.

And crazily, the team who finished eighth out of 12 in the Premiership could yet be England's No 1 seeds in Europe next season if they win the play-offs at Twickenham on 8 June.

The Tigers will get that top seeding if they beat Munster but, having won the inaugural play-offs last year as part of a unique treble, they treated the chance to repeat the feat as a non-event.

Martin Johnson, Neil Back and Tim Stimpson were all rested, and it was unedifying to watch quality players such as Ben Kay and Martin Corry forced to go through the motions. Pride in one's performance is one thing, but only Europe at this stage of the longest season matters to Leicester now.

Ryan said he had jettisoned his original game plan after heavy rain left standing water on many parts of the field, but Plan B worked just fine. Three tries in the first half, each of them from first-phase possession at scrum or line-out, increased by half the number conceded here by Leicester during the entire Premiership campaign. Felipe Contepomi sent David Rees ripping through the Leicester defence on a scissors move after 24 minutes to put Bristol 10-3 up, and they never looked back.

With Austin Healey, playing at scrum-half, decidedly off colour, Leicester were lacking in inspiration. Not so Contepomi, who again proved he had the measure of the Tigers' midfield with an arcing run off a Bristol line-out and a looped pass to Lee Best which the full-back fed on for Jamie Williams to score in the right-hand corner.

Andy Goode replied with a penalty goal for Leicester – he and Contepomi had landed one apiece in the first quarter – but Michael Lipman, an English-born flanker who has represented Australia under-21s, sliced between Healey and Goode from another Contepomi pass to make it 24-6 in first-half injury time.

A computer gizmo that allows Leicester's coaches to review the action on-screen while the match is in progress meant that Dean Richards and company knew exactly where to point the finger at half-time, had they chosen to do so. Certainly Contepomi found it tougher going, and was restricted to a penalty goal after 47 minutes, but neither did Leicester remotely threaten a fightback.

Only in the last minute of normal time did they avoid the added ignominy of going without a try, when Goode slithered over and added the conversion.

"We have this habit of winning the big matches, and next week's is far bigger than this one," said Richards, who last presided over a defeat at Welford Road when Leinster won an inconsequential European tie in January 2000. The other Deano, Bristol's Ryan, said: "To come here and beat Leicester is a huge achievement. We're ecstatic, and we're not going to hide it."

Leicester: A Billig; L Lloyd (J Naylor, 5), O Smith (G Gelderbloom, 71), R Kafer, F Tuilagi; A Goode, A Healey (J Hamilton, 55); G Rowntree (P Freshwater, 66), D West (capt; R Cockerill, 66), R Nebbett, L Deacon, B Kay, L Moody, M Corry, J Kronfeld (W Johnson, 79).

Bristol: L Best; D Rees, J Williams (M Carrington, 80), J Little (capt), P Christophers; F Contepomi, A Pichot; D Crompton (T Payne, 68), N McCarthy, E Bergamaschi, B Sturnham, A Brown, C Short (C Morgan, 79), J Brownrigg, M Lipman.

Referee: C White (Gloucestershire).