Defiant Exeter are proving their revival is the real deal

Rob Baxter suggested that this was a bad week to face Bath, with the defending champions smarting from a stunning defeat at home to a weakened Northampton.

After a 20-minute red card for his Exeter Chiefs team in only the second minute and four rapid Bath tries inside the opening quarter on Saturday, the experienced Baxter was looking remarkably prescient.

Except Exeter this season have rediscovered the kind of resolve and belief to climb up those mountains in search of comebacks that served them so well in their trophy-winning seasons, and on Saturday they improbably hauled themselves back from 26-0 down in the 20th minute to level the game with a try by Manny Feyi-Waboso in the 74th minute which Henry Slade converted from the touchline.

It took a 38-phase barrage from Bath to finally break Exeter’s spirit and secure a 33-26 win for the champions, but let there be no doubt that Exeter are back in trophy contention this season.

The bare numbers illustrate Exeter’s stunning turnaround. By the Devon club’s recent standards, last season was a disaster. Finishing ninth, with only four league wins in 18 matches, was their lowest position in the Prem since winning promotion in 2010. A return of only 29 points. Nine games into this season, they have six victories and 34 points.

Had you told Chiefs supporters at the start of the season that they would be just two points off defending champions Bath after visiting the Rec, they may have asked what you were drinking.

Before the game, Baxter reflected on Exeter’s final game not of last season, but the 2023-24 campaign. They went to Leicester with an outside chance of making the play-offs, but were well beaten 40-22. They had lost a number of senior players over the previous 18 months without replacing them. As heads turned towards the summer, Baxter could sense the squad’s satisfaction with how the season had gone despite missing the play-offs.

“You just can’t go into an off-season like that. You just can’t,” he said. “There’s no sport in the world where the top professionals just have five weeks off and expect pre-season to get them fit, is there? Not any more. If you get that part of it wrong, and then that means the first part of pre-season is just to create base levels of what’s a minimum expectation, the season is going to be tough.”

Hence Exeter finishing ninth last term. One benefit was that when it came to pre-season this summer, there was no confusion around what was required. “Everybody, even the better guys from last season, came in better this season,” added Baxter. Exeter hit the ground running and new higher standards were set.

“A lot of players lowered the expectations of themselves during last season to an unacceptably low level. We knocked that out of them pretty quickly,” says Baxter. “They didn’t realise they were probably accepting it. So we had to set a whole new set of parameters around that – our running fitness, our running load.”

Olly Woodburn, one of Exeter’s try-scorers on Saturday, has been at Exeter for a decade, starting in both of the club’s Prem final wins. He was not a full participant during pre-season, working his way back from a cruciate injury, but saw enough to know that “it was definitely one of the toughest pre-seasons. I was on the sideline, watching the pain. I felt for them.” Those fresh standards included simplifying things. Do your role to the best of your ability, win the 50-50s, and the trust will build.

Two of Exeter’s biggest wins this season, over Sale and Saracens, featured successful late surges because Exeter’s players, according to Woodburn, “trusted the system and the players around us. We have world-class basics at this club and that’s going to keep us in any game.”

Woodburn compares watching Exeter unravel during the previous season with having “quite a few holes to plug – you try to plug one and then another one opens”. Now, they are much more secure.

Exeter began to build; a key new coach, a raft of good signings and younger players developing at a rapid rate. Dave Walder arriving as attack coach has added a fresh voice and the detail in how he wants Exeter to move the ball is beginning to bed in.

“He communicates in a different way – he allows players to develop and gives them quite a lot of trust and accountability,” says Woodburn. Two good examples of that would be the form of Harvey Skinner at fly-half, with Woodburn adding that Skinner is playing with “so much confidence” because he is working with Walder each week to make a tactical plan, “rather than be[ing] told what to do”.

The other is Woodburn’s move from wing to full-back, which he has found to be “reinvigorating” at 35, with Walder not forcing Woodburn to play outside his natural game and trusting him in the system. Baxter offers a similar assessment of Walder, noting that he “sets very high standards, but then he has a very good manner with the players individually to make sure those points get across”.

Regarding recruitment, Australia internationals Len Ikitau and Tom Hooper were high-profile signings, with Ikitau unfortunately now sidelined until March with a shoulder injury. But the lesser-heralded bits of business – Joseph Dweba, Andrea Zambonin, Bachuki Tchumbadze, Stephen Varney – have all been hits. Varney has already been re-signed to a new three-year contract.

And those young players? Greg Fisilau, who added another try against Bath to his impressive tally, is bustling his way into the England conversation at No 8, while Kane James and Campbell Ridl are beginning to make their mark, even though Ridl was unfortunately shown a 20-minute red card for taking out Henry Arundell in the air on Saturday. Exeter’s England wing Feyi-Waboso is also still just 23.

There is one other element behind this revival: camaraderie. A lively bus journey back to Devon after winning at Saracens – “a great bus” according to Baxter, which Woodburn describes as “old school” and “intimate” – is the kind of positive memory that binds a squad together. Even if their valiant fightback on Saturday came up short, the resuscitation of Exeter Chiefs this season has been a welcome surprise.

Photograph by David Davies/PA