Down time important, says Baxter

Rob Baxter thinks his Exeter Chiefs players will be able to keep their intensity up in training after having this week away from the club.

As the Sandy Park outfit are without a game this weekend, the head coach gave the squad time off to work on their fitness on their own and spend more time with their families.

With no weekend off between now and mid-April at the earliest, depending of their progress in the European Champions Cup, Baxter felt it was important for the players to have some down time.

But they will return on Monday ready to crank things up against in the final two Westcountry Challenge Cup fixtures before the Aviva Premiership campaign starts on October 17.

Baxter said: “The players have got this week off as a chance to freshen up and a last chance for everyone to get a bit of family time before we lock down for pre-season and then the Premiership and European Champions Cup.

“When you look at the season and the extended pre-season, you’ve got to make sure you build these times off in because otherwise you can make things a bit monotonous. When you start to feel that training has become a job and something you get through it’s easy to lose intensity, and if you get into the habit of losing intensity in training it’s easy for that to hang over into games.

“Having this break means everyone will be fresh to come back in on Monday, the players will be excited about getting back together and spending more time together and training will be focused because we have a game on Saturday. By the end of these next two pre-season games all the players will know where they stand in the pecking order as well, then we’ll go into our first Premiership game.

“All of those things will be very important as we go forward.”

Exeter’s home matches in the pre-season competition have seen them beat Gloucester 41-38 and Bath 59-14.

Tougher challenges will come when they travel to those sides, starting with Gloucester next weekend, with all three clubs expected to field stronger teams as they build up to the start of the season.

Baxter is pleased with what he has seen so far, in particular the way the players responded to the areas they were asked to work on leading up to last weekend’s game against Bath.



“With any of these pre-season games, you have to bear in mind the quality of the opposition and it was a young and mix-match Bath side, but at the same time we were a bit like that as well,” said Baxter.

“We talk about making steps forward in pre-season and advancing our game and showing good character, and the pleasing thing for me was that we highlighted only a couple of work-ons from the previous pre-season game against Gloucester and the players dealt with those very well. We talked about how well we looked after the ball and there was a noticeable improvement in that area, we spoke about our defensive attitude, especially as we made changes to the team and the game grew older, and that part went really well too.

“It was pleasing to see how well things are bedding in for us as a team. We looked solid in the set-piece again, which is always going to be important, and it was a great credit to Joe Simmonds how he played but also you have to give credit to the systems that are in place and the players around him that he was able to fit in and run the game like he did.”