Lewis enjoys first season at Exe

By Nick Warren

Dave Lewis said Exeter Chiefs’ players could be proud of their efforts against Harlequins despite suffering a late defeat.

The Sandy Park outfit went down 30-29 on Sunday in front of a capacity crowd in their final home game of the season.

But having been beaten by a record 55-12 in their previous outing against Sale, scrum-half Lewis felt there was a huge improvement against Harlequins.

The former Gloucester player scored his side’s opening try against the Londoners as they built a 16-5 lead by half-time, only to see Quins cross three times after the break to snatch the victory.

“We talked about having that bite in defence again and I thought the boys put in a great shift,” said Lewis. “There were some big hits going in, we made a mess of the breakdown, and the boys can hold their heads up high.”

Lewis, 25, felt the improvements were down to a focus on doing the basics well and building from there.

As well as his score, that approach saw Matt Jess cross for a try in the second half. Gareth Steenson converted both and landed five penalties.

“I think it was just remembering what we were good at a couple of weeks ago and trying to work on that,” Lewis said of the Chiefs’ upturn in form.

“We didn’t want to over-complicate things, we wanted to go through the basics and work really hard. That’s what we did out there and it showed it works. We scored 29 points and if you do that you’d like to think you’d win, so it’s frustrating we didn’t, but we need to keep doing it.”

Exeter’s display against Quins was far from perfect, as several times the visitors replied within minutes of the Chiefs scoring.

Lewis felt his side could have won comfortably if they had been more disciplined, but admitted it was not the first time this season they have come up just short.

He said: “Again it’s one of those games that’s got away from us that you can pinpoint specific things, like if we’d been more accurate in certain areas we wouldn’t be talking about a loss we’d be talking about a win by about 10 points.

“That’s frustrating and something that’s happened all season, and we need to address that for next season.”

He added: “We worked hard to get our points and then we seemed to give them away easily.

“It’s a massive improvement on Sale, we have to build on that for this weekend and next season as well. We’ll take the positives, learn from the mistakes and move on.”

Exeter have one more match to go this term as they end their campaign at Newcastle Falcons this Saturday.

Lewis thinks the Chiefs can travel to Kingston Park in high spirits as they look to bring the curtain down on the season in style.

“If we can carry on the form we showed on Sunday, and iron out those little mistakes, we will go up to Newcastle feeling very confident,” he said. “We want to put in a good performance and get a win up there.”

Sunday’s match was also the last at Sandy Park in its present form, with development work continuing on the West Grandstand to add 2,000 extra seats while the East Terrace is replaced by a new structure with double the capacity and the pitch re-laid.

Lewis and his team-mates are looking forward to the transformation for next season.

“The fans have been brilliant. They’ve been very loud all year, whether it’s been at Sandy Park or whether it’s been away from home,” Lewis said. “You can always hear the tomahawk chop and that’s fantastic.

“They were very loud again on Sunday and it really does help you out on the pitch. All the boys are looking forward to coming back and having larger changing rooms, and to have an extra two or three thousand people here will make the atmosphere even better.”