At Sandy Park on Wednesday, Rob Baxter provided a great insight into whether he remains in charge of Exeter. It’s understandable that the 53-year-old, director of rugby for the Devon club, is growing tired after 16 consecutive seasons, but there was no sign of boredom during the busy weekdays.
With Chiefs’ open training session about to begin at Sandy Park, Baxter was interviewed on the touchline and fans gathered in the West Grandstand were able to hear every word he said. He watched some on-field action in the build-up to Saturday’s pre-season double-header v London Scottish and Cornish Pirates before giving a 40-minute roundtable interview with the media covering a range of topics.
Further business was on the agenda that afternoon, including a call with England manager Steve Borthwick regarding the new Pro Game Board RFU/Premiership Rugby deal to be revealed next month. That said, it’s all worked out and Baxter continues to love it.
questioner rugby pass If he did anything in particular to stop the creeping banality, he said: When the season ends, I take a good rest for a few weeks. But I am very fortunate in my role and job here. I’m almost like an Exeter Chiefs fan.
“Maybe if I didn’t work here I wouldn’t be one of the people watching today (Wednesday’s training) but I would definitely be one of the people watching Saturday and I’d be sitting with mates I used to watch. We played together, had a pint, sat down with my wife and enjoyed the day.
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“That’s why I’m passionate about seeing the team do well and the club do well. In that respect, I am lucky. I also think that sometimes we all need to stop and take a moment to talk to ourselves. For example, there are 10 directors of rugby in this country’s Premiership, which is quite a privileged position. If you find yourself thinking ‘that was rough’ after a season and you’ve been thinking that way for too long, you need to have a little conversation with yourself.
“I do the same thing as everyone else. I watch different sports. I watch movies to get ideas. We’ve taken a few ideas on some of the things that resonated with us this season, centered around young teams and people who have achieved things we didn’t think they could achieve.
“That kind of stuff is still very interesting to me. As I said, working with young people definitely makes you a bit more passionate and sensitive. Because they are much easier to work with and much easier to manage. That definitely keeps things fresh.”
Baxter’s first time at the helm was in 2009, with the club’s former lock leaving to take up the role as forwards coach following the sacking of Pete Drewett. Life was definitely different, small business back then. Chiefs were long-term residents of Championship level before their first ever Premiership promotion was secured at the end of Baxter’s first season as boss.
“The first year in the Premiership it was just Ali (Heffer) and me. So I was like a DoR, doing recruiting, salary cap work, miscellaneous things, but I also did forwards and defense. Ali played back, attack, Ricky (Pellow) did a bit of technique, Robin Cowling came in part-time from Truro College and did a bit of scrum and that was it. That was our coaching staff.
“A lot happened in the first two or three years, but in a different way. It’s a much bigger club now so there’s a lot going on. We have grown beyond all proportion. How we are, what we do, staffing levels and all that, our academy. It all just started. It is a constantly evolving role. I’ve been really lucky to work with some really great people. So I still think I have a few good years left, but hopefully.”
After finishing seventh in the league last season, the most important thing in Baxter’s in-tray in 2024/25 will be adding a much-needed layer of away-day steel to his young squad. Double champions of England and Europe in 2019/20, trophies proudly placed in the trophy cabinet along the corridor after entering Sandy Park’s ground floor main entrance, last season was the first year of rebuilding.
Stars such as Luke Cowan-Dickie, the Simmonds brothers, Jack Nowell and Stuart Hogg have all left, leaving Baxter to give youngsters a chance. There was a Champions Cup group win at Toulon in December, but that campaign ended with a 64-26 quarter-final hammering at Toulouse.
BACK BACK: The 2024/25 season began with a trip to Exeter, where they combined a media day with an open training session. Rob Baxter tells us what a good season looks like. #GallagherPrem #rugby pic.twitter.com/uN5FTC7BT8
— Liam Heagney (@heagneyl) August 21, 2024
Their league effort also ended disastrously, with Leicester winning 40-22 at Welford Road. Their lack of competitiveness hurt as they lost all six of their nine-game Premiership road trip, losing just one loss/try bonus point and finished six points behind fourth-placed Saracens in the play-off race.
“I wouldn’t say we were completely inexperienced, but you know the players we lost and the amount of experience they had and how many players came in and had their first full season. This is probably 80% of us. Regular army.
“We got a fighting chance at the end of the Premier League and, to be fair, I wonder if Sale were lucky to go to Saracens and win. I wonder if our performance in Leicester, which was quite poor, would have hurt us a little if qualification for the semifinals was at stake. We were disappointed for a variety of reasons, and the reality was that we didn’t perform well away from home all year. There is a reality to it and I challenged the players at the end of the season…
“I can’t say we were satisfied with the away game where we didn’t get any points other than the game we won. I looked at it and thought, ‘Really!’ These are statistics. All the away points we got were from games we won, and we didn’t get any loss bonus points or try bonus points from any games that didn’t go our way.
“We clearly see that we need to establish something a bit stubborn and a bit hard to beat and collect points. But there’s no doubt you’ll want to see it because you’ve been watching us for 10 years. – In years when we regularly reached the finals, we rarely failed to score a point in every game of the season.
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“That was one of the important things. Even if you beat us, we would still get something. There was a season where we scored a point in every game. Then you start to become a tough team to beat. I probably didn’t realize it until someone told me. A lot of games last season we had 80, 90% of our team at Welford Road in Gloucester, and we had players who had never played in all these types of venues. Before there. That’s something we can learn from.
“We also took some of the pressure off the players by giving them a very simple game plan and very simple objectives. We probably pushed the team’s development a little hard at times because we wanted to be a little further away from home. This diluted and put pressure on areas that could have kept us in the game longer.
“The reality is that we face Northampton in our first away game (September 28). They are the current champions and we need to do something in the last quarter to make them feel they could lose the game. This is That’s how we’ve succeeded before.
“The other person looks around and starts to get a little nervous. Because you’re within seven points and all of a sudden you make a few mistakes and you win the game. We’ll have to formalize the path again, but I’m confident we can do that. I am confident that we have gained experience in how we should coach and the players themselves.
“We couldn’t be more excited about the players and the potential we have. But at the same time, there will be some pressure to collect points. That’s the advantage of the Premiership. We all start from zero. If you look around after week 3 and only have 2 or 3 points, it feels like a very difficult competition.
“I think we have enough excitement within the team and enough quality on the wing to be very competitive in each game. We need to give players a chance to persevere when times are tough, and to really fly when times are good. “That’s all I can say.”
Aiding this process is Baxter’s previous experience nurturing young teams into winners, as happened in the original evolution from a Premiership rookie side to a first-ever title-winning side in 2017. The pattern of five different clubs becoming champions over the past five seasons is also a plus.
“The Premiership has changed a bit as a competition. It doesn’t seem like a competition that will feature many back-to-back finals or back-to-back winners. It’s been a while since that scenario seemed to repeat itself, and this year it’s about to get interesting again.
“Don’t forget that we are building this team similarly to how we built the team that reached our first Premiership final, in that we went into the Premiership with a relatively low budget, well below the salary cap. As our crowds grew, our business grew and Sandy Park developed, my playing budget increased and this helped the team grow, which allowed me to retain the best young players.
“We had to cut the budget and we had to cut from the cloth and make money again, and at that moment we would have been back in the process in terms of the budget growing and being able to move forward. My goal is to make sure our paths follow the same path, but the ingredients are there.
? Slade scores for Exeter!
? @ExeterChiefs Score from a corner after an “interesting” penalty routine! #GallagherPrem | #EXEvHAR pic.twitter.com/CaW9lm5Snl
— Rugby on TNT Sports (@rugbyntnt) May 11, 2024
“We have a homegrown group that looks like they will be here for a long time and we should be able to add to and expand the squad in the future as it stands. Teams now don’t say, ‘That’s it, there’s nothing more we can do, we’re spending every penny of salary cap space.’
“We are as far from what you can get, so if all our domestic players become international players I expect to be able to keep them all. Not many teams will be in that position right now.
“If you think you need to add, like we did, you can go out and cherry-pick two or three top quality players. We bought Nic White (back in the day), brought us in, and got Dean Mumm. We will be in a position to do that again and it will all be part of the formula of developing a young team.”
So where will Exeter sit once things settle down in 2024/25? “It’s so difficult to predict. If you look at the squad, for example the teams that played in the final (Northampton and Bath), you can’t say ‘they won’t be a good team’ because they haven’t lost much. They spent that extra time together.
“When you look at the teams that are at the top of the league, you think, ‘They’re going to be a very good team.’ “The challenge for us, not being in the top tier, is how to improve and add ourselves to get into that group.”
