Chiefs side to face Harlequins
By Mark Stevens
6/3/22
As Exeter Chiefs prepare to bring the curtain down on their 2021/22 season tomorrow, Director of Rugby, Rob Baxter, insists he is already looking to the future.
For the first time in seven years, Devon’s finest won’t be amongst English rugby’s top four sides contesting for a spot in the end of season showpiece at Twickenham at the end of this month.
Injuries, international call-ups, form, together with an all-round improvement across the league, has hampered the Chiefs during the course of a season in which Baxter knows his side have failed to hit the heights of previous campaigns.
Tomorrow, the Chiefs will play out their final game of the regular season against Harlequins at a packed out Sandy Park (3pm).
The reigning champions will take to the field safe in the knowledge that they are again just a game away from contesting for the English game’s top prize. However, Baxter aims to ensure their build-up to their last four tussle is anything but smooth sailing.
“We’re expecting them to come out flying at us,” he said. “They are a squad in a semi-final next week, who’ve not played for a while, so we’re bracing ourselves for what is coming. For us, it’s a great opportunity to go out there and show what we’re about. We’ve done a fair bit of talking these last few weeks during some of our reviews and now it’s time to see who will ‘walk the walk’.
“In reviews there is always a lot of talk, now we’ve got to find who in the group will walk the walk. As I said, we’ve talked a lot recently about where we want to go and what we will need to do to achieve success next season. I’ve said to the players that we do need to leave behind the success of recent years as it’s not relevant for a lot of them. That said, we do have to use that recent success as markers moving forward.
“If I take us back to that last season before we got into that first semi-final, we’ve got pictures of guys like Jack Nowell, Henry Slade and Luke Cowan-Dickie, all of whom look like young kids. For them, they were just getting their initial experiences in the Premiership around that time.
“This season, we’ve got guys in our squad who are in a similar position. People like Sam Maunder, Josh Hodge, Dafydd Jenkins, Pat Schickerling, they’ve all come through. Tom Hendrickson has had a lot more game time, as has Richard Capstick. Others would have had it not been for injuries, guys like Rus Tuima and Sean Lonsdale.
“You can’t tell me that when you talk to these guys about this season, yes they will be disappointed with where we are and not necessarily qualifying like we have in the past. However, they’ve all had real breakthrough seasons and benefitted from being exposed to playing in the Premiership and the Champions Cup.”
Baxter added: “The negative bit is there have been games where we could have played better and there have been results which we should have made go our way. Had we done that, then we would have kept the season a little bit more exciting for us, but we haven’t!
“We can look at excuses, all kinds of things, and I’m prepared to put my own hand up and say we got things wrong, especially at the start of the season. I know we could have approached it in a bit more exciting fashion because there were a lot of changes, it was a different group of players, and we needed to reset our goals a bit.
“As the season went on, the challenges never really got easier and we found ourselves desperately chasing points. We never really recovered from that and that’s where we find ourselves now. As I said, we know we could gave been better, but it’s happened now. Now, I don’t want to use hindsight to kill ourselves, I want us to use it to get better and already we’re going through that process really well.”
Indeed, Baxter and his team are already looking to the future and they aim to use tomorrow’s showdown with Harlequins as the ideal opportunity to lay the foundation stones for next season’s push.
“I’m already feeling good about next season because we have already gone done a track which feels very exciting,” explained the Exeter boss. “The one thing we will really focus on is enjoying next season as a playing group because that has always brought the best out in us. When we have been a work hard, play hard side, enjoying one another’s company, it’s brought the best out in us.
“That’s the aim because I want to make sure this is a great rugby club that achieves great things.”
Team news for the Chiefs sees England international Jack Nowell return to the starting line-up for the first time in ten weeks following a broken arm. He returns to a back division which also sees Harvey Skinner start in the centre and Stu Townsend at scrum-half.
In the pack, skipper Jack Yeandle starts in an unchanged front-row alongside Alec Hepburn and Harry Williams, but there are changes behind with Jenkins coming into the second-row and Richard Capstick added to the back-row.
On the bench, Sam Skinner is set for his final outing in an Exeter jersey before his move to Edinburgh; Welshman Iestyn Harris gets his first-ever involvement with the first team squad, whilst Sean O’Brien and Facundo Cordero offers options in the backline.
