So much for a mellow bank holiday weekend beside the river Exe. Never before has the West Country played host to a Monday afternoon street parade to salute England’s league champions and the warm and fuzzy feeling from Newlyn to Newton Abbot is equally unprecedented. Even for those locals still crawling back from “the Smoke” or struggling to raise heads off pillows, the thrill will take a lifetime to fade.
Three contrasting post-match snapshots showed what it all meant. Rob Baxter’s genuine fly-in-the-eye emotion on the pitch and the receiving line of supporters waiting to shake the hand of the chairman, Tony Rowe, both summed up the storybook nature of the Chiefs’ crowning achievement but the most telling image was the picture of the entire squad blinking in the Sunday morning light outside Gareth Steenson’s bar-cum-garage, all cheerfully clad as Robin Hood and his Merry Men.
Not many Wembley match-winners would happily post a picture of themselves dressed as Maid Marian on social media but Steenson and his inspiring club have long since felt that enjoyment and achievement should not be mutually exclusive. If the cider and pasties on the coach on the way home to Devon are not normally recommended by leading sports nutritionists, the recipe is working just fine for them.
The Chiefs’ team spirit is so strong that even those with a prime excuse to slip away for an early night could not bear to miss out on the celebrations. Jack Nowell was required to join up with the Lions in London at lunchtime but still chose to return to Exeter before catching a bleary-eyed 7am cab back to the capital to pack his bags, attend the official farewell tour dinner and prepare for the long flight to New Zealand via Dubai and Melbourne.
While Saturday’s extraordinary extra-time triumph and a typically sharp first-half try will ease the inevitable weariness in his legs, the transition from club to Lion will require real mental agility with his brain still fizzing from the Chiefs’ finest hour and 40 minutes. “I’m going to enjoy it because it means so much to us,” said the England winger. “Times like this don’t come round very often. For us to lift the main trophy in England … I’m going to make the most of it.”
The three-hour taxi ride to London also allowed Cornwall’s favourite sporting son to sit back and reflect on the next step – “Getting the chance to play for the Lions is any rugby player’s dream” – for himself and his club. Every season since their promotion from the Championship in 2010 the Chiefs have grown steadily stronger and Baxter, an increasingly strong candidate to succeed Eddie Jones as England’s head coach, is already refusing to entertain a gentle slide back to provincial obscurity.
If any comparisons can be drawn with the Chiefs’ remarkable rise, Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest side of the late 1970s might just be the most apposite. In both cases the journey started in a lower league and showed bigger, wealthier names that collective courage of conviction and strength of character win titles as much as individual talent. Forest went on to win the European Cup in the following two seasons and Rowe is now urging Exeter to crack on and do likewise.
And why not? These are unusually grounded champions, self-critical enough to accept the need to redouble their efforts after starting the season at the bottom of the table following defeats by Wasps and Saracens and being thumped by Clermont Auvergne in Europe. “We sat down after Clermont and said: ‘This isn’t us. We’re dwelling too much on what’s happened. We’re almost expecting things to happen,’” Nowell said. “We didn’t change training, we didn’t change the way we play. It was just about us going out there, attacking and actually grabbing it.”
Sixteen successive Premiership wins later they were given the same message in the dressing-room at half-time on Saturday. A powerful opening quarter and a deserved 14-3 lead, courtesy of Nowell and Phil Dollman, was in danger of being squandered as Wasps, with the outstanding Nathan Hughes having a stormer, fought back through Jimmy Gopperth’s try shortly before the interval.
When a helpful bounce set up Elliot Daly’s 44th-minute try and Gopperth extended the lead to 20-14, the onus was on the Chiefs to demonstrate again just how much they wanted it. That is seldom Exeter’s weakness and Steenson’s 79th-minute penalty after Hughes was penalised at a ruck sent the contest into barely watchable extra-time.
Wasps also deserve applause for their contribution to the tensest final in memory, with Steenson’s nerveless shot in the last-chance saloon sparing everyone the nightmarish lottery of a place-kicking contest. Having enjoyed two-thirds possession and territory, as well as superiority at the scrums, the Chiefs would have been gutted had they lost. Dai Young, the beaten director of rugby, to his credit declined to seek uncontested scrums when his two specialist tight-heads were injured, insisting he would “rather lose” than stoop to that desperate last resort.
The Chiefs, regardless, are now officially the bosses of English rugby, having built spectacularly on the legacy of Dick Manley, Bob Staddon, John Baxter, Andy Maunder and everyone else who gave heart and soul to the 146-year-old club in less heady days. A region steeped in rugby but, until now, starved of national success is walking that little bit taller this morning.
Wasps Le Roux; Wade, Daly, Gopperth, Bassett; Cipriani, Robson (Simpson, 57); Mullan (McIntyre, 57) Taylor (Johnson, 64), Swainston (Moore, 27), Launchbury (capt), Symons (Myall, 57) Haskell, Young (Thompson, 64), Hughes.
Tries Gopperth, Daly. Cons Gopperth 2. Pens Gopperth 2.
Exeter Chiefs Dollman (Slade, 46); Nowell, Whitten, Devoto (Campagnaro, 76), Woodburn; Steenson (capt), Townsend (Chudley, 49); Moon (Rimmer, 50), Cowan-Dickie (Yeandle, 50), Williams (Francis, 50), Dennis (S Simmonds, 60), Parling, Horstmann (Lees, 52), Armand, Waldrom.
Tries Nowell, Dollman. Cons Steenson 2. Pens Steenson 3.
Referee JP Doyle. Att 79,657.
