Hepher hails Chiefs showing

By Mark Stevens

Assistant coach Ali Hepher praised the ‘mental approach’ of the Exeter Chiefs players after they returned to winning ways in the Aviva Premiership with an impressive 44-24 success over visiting London Irish.

In a dominant first half period, the Chiefs built a 30-3 lead thanks to tries from Carl Rimmer, Henry Slade and Damian Welch, as well as the boot of fly-half Gareth Steenson.

The onslaught continued after the break as Welch added a second converted score alongside another from back-row forward Don Armand.

Irish finished strongly to give some credibility to the scoreline thanks to converted scores from Blair Cowan (2) and Andrew Fenby, but the day well and truly belonged to Devon’s finest, who moved back into third place in the standings with their fourth league win of the season.

For Hepher, though, it was the response of the players which he was keen to highlight post match, particularly after the disappointment of narrowly going down to Newcastle Falcons the week previous.

“Our mental approach and preparation for the game was excellent and they have turned it round very quickly in a week,” said Hepher. “If that is what we learnt last week, then that’s great because there were a lot of positives out there.

“Every man stood up and got themselves in the right frame of mind and we know that we are capable of beating a lot of sides if we do that. It was pleasing to get the bonus point because we have been on three tries for the past two weeks.

“That has been a little frustrating because we always want to target as many points as we can get – and we took advantage of that. We applied pressure in the second half and didn’t give them a sniff back into the game until the final ten minutes.

“They had started the second half strongly, but we were expecting that so the defence was important in this game. We got some good shots in with aggressive tackles but the game slipped away in the later stages.We were clinical and we put our points on the board. We knew that Irish would be a strong side because they have either run good sides close or beaten them so we knew that we had to be right on our game to beat them.”

Although the Chiefs have collected four wins and 20 points out of their opening six Premiership games, Hepher knows Exeter’s total could easily have been more having succumb to close losses against both Leicester Tigers and Newcastle Falcons.

“We could have picked up more points along the way and we were in every game,” added Hepher. “We are learning by every game and we haven’t made the same mistakes twice. They are a smart group of guys, but they need to go through some of these things to come through as a better team.

“As I say, we are in good shape, we have picked some up points and are probably ahead of schedule, but we have some tough Premiership games ahead of us. We’ll regroup now and look to prepare for that so we can push our game on in that period and come back a better side when we play at Northampton (on Nov 14).”

The Chiefs will now take a month’s break from top flight action as they engage in European Challenge Cup fixtures with Bayonne and Connacht, before beginning the defence of their LV= Cup crown with back-to-back home games against Gloucester and Bath.

“We’ll have a look at things and the squad, but the truth is we want to win every game and every tournament we are in,” continued Hepher. “Obviously it starts with the Premiership, which is our priority, but there are good opportunities in Europe and the LV as we showed last year

“We are just looking to win every game, we have a squad good enough to win every game and we will pick the side on that basis.”