Baxter already hard at work

It doesn't seem five minutes ago that Rob Baxter was leading his Exeter side into battle at Twickenham, but already the Chiefs' head coach is hard at work readying his troops for next season's title assault.

Whilst the majority of the Sandy Park playing staff enjoy some much-needed rest and recuperation after a heroic past campaign, Baxter himself is busy working behind the scenes on preparations for the 2016/17 season.

In just two weeks' time, those Chiefs not away on international duty will return to duty for the start of what is always a gruelling, yet enjoyable, pre-season build-up.

"I’m fairly busy because we're back into pre-season in two weeks' time, so there's a fair bit of preparation that goes on in getting that right,” said Baxter. “I’ve had a bit of time away at home and a bit of time on the farm, but now I'm back into looking at last season's games again.”

In what was another impressive year for Baxter and his side, not only did they reach their first-ever Aviva Premiership final - losing out 28-20 to Saracens - but the Devon club also advanced to the quarter-finals of the European Champions Cup for the first time.

Such success has meant the expectation levels will have risen another notch, but the Chiefs leader says he and his team will be determined to improve even further when the season kicks-off in September.

“Obviously my big area is the defence so I'm going to spend a bit of time over the next couple of weeks looking at where we made our mistakes last year and how we can improve a little bit,” added Baxter. "That said, we were the best defence in the Premiership over the 22 rounds, so whatever improvements we can make will be very good for us.”

As part of the build-up to the new season, the Chiefs - as has become the norm these days - will head off overseas for some warm weather training in Portugal at the end of the month.

“We're back in for our pre-season warm weather training trip to the Algarve in a couple of weeks so the lads will have a couple of good days out there having a nice time and bonding a little bit," continued Baxter. "Then we're in and we're full on for a block of four weeks.

"During that time there will be a lot of conditioning, but we also do a lot of rugby as well. The guys will then have a week off and then we'll come back into the pre-season games, so it's a very short pre-season for us this year.”

With 14 of his squad currently away on international duty around the world, Baxter admits it will be a somewhat staggered approach as he filters those players back into the main nucleus of his squad.

Baxter said: “We're going to have quite a lot of international players joining us through the pre-season so some of them won't be with us until the start of August, as will a couple of our new signings.

"Therefore there will be some fractures, but we haven't got a lot of changes in the squad. We're hoping that we'll get the benefits of giving the guys a decent bit of time off because the truth is the majority of them keep themselves in very good physical condition anyway so we'll soon be back in in a couple of weeks and we're going to be going flat out.”