When Exeter lost at home to Bath at the end of October they slipped to seventh in the Premiership, the memory of their Twickenham final against Saracens five months earlier fading. Rob Baxter, the head coach who guided them out of the Championship in 2010, was facing perhaps his most testing time since the Chiefs established themselves in the top flight.
“It is easy to say that our bad start was a hangover from the final but that is not how I would describe it,” Baxter says as he prepares for Saturday’s play-off semi-final against Saracens at Sandy Park. “I spoke to the players after we had lost by eight points to a very good team [at Twickenham] and probably went on too much about how well we had done in the season. What I should have said was that we had lost the final and what were we going to do about it.”
The defeat by Bath, which followed another last-minute score to deny the Chiefs victory at Ulster in the Champions Cup the previous week, marked a turning point although not, Baxter insists, a turnaround. Since then they have not lost in the Premiership, 13 victories and two draws taking them to second in the table, where they were last season, finishing the campaign with eight successive wins that were all achieved with a bonus point, a top-flight record.
“The turnaround was not starting to play well but playing badly before that,” Baxter says. “There was a bit of doubt around but we dealt with it really well and it improved us as a side. We did not lose our focus at the start of the season but, when I thought about it, we had had our shortest pre-season because the previous campaign had never gone on as long for us, we had a number of players away on tour with the two England teams and the fitness levels were not quite there. We won our three pre-season matches against strong opposition and lost late on at Wasps first up and I felt things were OK.
“The lads were training well and in terms of match statistics we were fine but, as the weeks went on and we lost heavily at home to Clermont Auvergne, we decided as a coaching group not to hide behind stats but to talk about how we felt.
“Clermont gave us a lesson: we were not at our level and we started to talk about what to do about not winning the final. We had taken a breath instead of driving ourselves harder and the players set themselves higher markers for what was acceptable as a flat-out performance. The defeats by Ulster and Bath were heartbreaking and would have broken a lot of players but the lads did not back down and we have not lost in the league since. Everyone knew we had to be good today, not say it was going to be all right next week.”
Despite their strong recovery and impressive try-scoring surge at the end of the regular season that enabled them to set that record for successive bonus point victories, the Chiefs sealed home advantage in the play-offs only in the final round at Gloucester, again showing a capacity to come from behind. “We could not afford to drop a game and it shows how competitive the Premiership is,” Baxter says. “It is scary.”
Exeter scored 86 tries in their 22 league matches, up from 71 last season, and accumulated 82 more points. The top four reflected the highest scorers, with Wasps’ average scoreline 32-24, Exeter’s 30-21, Saracens’ 26-16 and Leicester’s 25-20. The Sandy Park play-off will be a contest between a side that is averaging virtually four tries a match against one that concede an average of 1.3, a figure inflated by the five Saracens conceded last weekend with a weakened team at Wasps.
“I am really pleased we are scoring so many points,” Baxter says. “We back our forwards to go to the corner and we multi-phase from our own 22. Playing like that, you are more likely to score tries than kick penalties. We want to exert pressure and that often leads to tries. We back ourselves to play at a high intensity and high ball in play time and do it better than the opposition. Our lads have really knuckled down and there has been no short cut.”
While Exeter have their first Lion in the wing Jack Nowell – Geoff Parling went to Australia in 2013 when he was at Leicester – the Chiefs are not a team that glitter because of their stars. They are very much a collective, as the form of Olly Woodburn, a wing who barely made a ripple at Bath, has shown.
“Olly has thrived through regular game time and the way we play means he touches the ball a lot, which has accelerated his development,” Baxter says. “He has opportunities to make decisions and that environment will only help a player. We are comfortable with the way we are playing and I am OK with facing Saracens. They are not a team I was desperate to avoid: you win things by taking people out, not avoiding them. For us, it was about getting a home semi-final, not about who we faced.
“They are the best defensive team in the Premiership and that will make it tough. There are some different things you need to do against them but we have beaten them home and away in the past. We have found a way to score tries against them and it is not mission impossible. If you aspire to be Premiership champions, you have to take Saracens out. Sandy Park will be packed to the rafters and it will be another great occasion.”
