'Chiefs have room to grow' - Baxter
By Mark Stevens
15/12/19
Exeter Chiefs Director of Rugby, Rob Baxter, says his players still feel they are growing as a team in Europe, despite making it four wins from four with today’s 35-10 victory over visiting Sale Sharks.
The Chiefs dominated from start to finish at Sandy Park, running in five tries through Sam Simmonds (2), Joe Simmonds, Ben Moon and Jack Nowell, to ensure they remain firmly on course for the knock-out stages in this season’s Heineken Champions Cup.
Baxter’s side need just a solitary point from their final two games next month against Glasgow Warriors (away) and La Rochelle (home) to ensure they will be amongst Europe’s elite in the last eight of the competition.
But with an unblemished record so far in Pool Two, Baxter wants his team to maintain their relentless approach and secure themselves home advantage in April’s quarter-finals.
“Obviously, I’m very pleased with the result and a lot of what we did out there today,” said Baxter. “That said, the players still feel they are growing as a team and that there is more to come from them.
“They are down there now in the changing rooms saying ‘well done’ to one another, but as a group they all feel there is a bit more to grow in terms of what we can achieve together. Elements of what we did today – and the mistakes we made at times – a lot of that was down to the players showing that little bit of desperation to do well, rather than Sale really causing us any major issues.
“Sometimes being that desperate doesn’t bring the best out of us. However, I’d much rather have that as a work-on as opposed to us not committing flat out physically to the game.I know when we commit flat out physically, we don’t tend to lose many games of rugby.”
Up against a strong first half breeze, the Chiefs kept it simple and concise during the first half, before cutting lose after the break to ensure they secured maximum reward.
The Simmonds brothers led the way, claiming Exeter’s opening three tries, before the Sharks bit back with a consolation score from centre Sam James. That try ignited the visiting charge for a moment, before a freak hail storm brought on-field proceedings to a halt for a number of minutes.
The break could not have come at a better time for the Chiefs, who used the time-out to not only realign themselves, but at the same time get some key messaging into the ranks for the final quarter of the contest.
Post-game, Baxter joked it was the ideal decision by French referee Pierre Brousset to withdraw the players due to the adverse weather.
“I thought it was a very good decision,” said a smiling Baxter. “Sale had just scored and the momentum of the game had just start to shift a little bit their way. The break gave us the chance to sit down with the guys, get a few messages into them, and from the moment we came back out, we were pretty good, weren’t we?
“As I said, I’m not going to complain about decisions like that, it was awful out there. You wouldn’t have seen a game like that played at the old County Ground!”
That was as subtle reference from Baxter himself to previous campaigns at the club’s old ground, where the former club captain would regularly have to charge around the field in atrocious conditions.
Instead, Baxter’s main focus was on the professionalism of how they had coped with the successive fixtures against the Sharks.
“I’ve just give the players great credit for this,” he continued. “We started this week and the first thing I started talking about was how we weren’t going to run away from any of the tough decisions or the tough chats we were going to have around this game,
“A lot of the guys experienced the double-header against Gloucester last season, where we lost the first game, then we made nine changes and went up to Gloucester the next week and won.
“Gloucester probably thought they had done the hard part by coming here and winning that day, so we knew what to expect in that sense. Sale this week made a similar amount of changes like we did, so it was important we got the message into the guys that we couldn’t have any hint of complacency or that we had done the hard part by going to Sale and winning last weekend.
“That kind of create a little bit of nervousness and edginess about us and that was perhaps evident in the first half. You saw an Exeter side that was half thinking we should probably kick here – and the other half who were thinking they could play a bit.
“What the issue is when it’s like that is until you really align yourselves all together, you’re never going to become a good, fluent side. At half time we managed to realign things and that in turn allowed us to drive the game we wanted to create,”
The Chiefs will now take a break from Europe until next month, but before then they have three crunch Gallagher Premiership fixtures to contend with against Leicester Tigers (away), Saracens (home) and London Irish (away).