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'It was hell for teams to play at Sandy Park, that has ebbed away'
By Liam Heagney
Rob Baxter has recognised that Exeter need to tweak their mindset and remember that their best seasons are built on them being horrible to play against at home at Sandy Park. The Chiefs host defending champions Harlequins on Saturday in Devon having won just six of their eleven home matches in this season’s Gallagher Premiership, a downturn in fortunes that has seen them squeezed out of the playoffs for the first time since 2015.
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In the six seasons in which they reached the semi-finals, going on to twice being crowned Premiership champions, the Exeter record at Sandy Park was daunting as they won 54 games, drew twice and were only beaten on ten occasions. Now they have suffered five losses in a single home campaign and face finishing at just breakeven – six wins and six losses – if Harlequins get the better of them this weekend.
It’s an aspect of the Chiefs’ results not lost on Baxter as he looks to remould a team that were crowned Premiership and European double champions in October 2020. Asked by RugbyPass for his reflections on what has happened to the Exeter form at Sandy Park in a 2021/22 campaign where they are currently seventh with one match remaining, the director of rugby said: “It’s really interesting.
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“If I sat here with a group of players they would all come up with slightly different reasons, slightly different ideas so whatever I say will be agreed, disagreed on, not thought of the same by various people. What I would say to you is the thing that has probably drifted with that kind of success over the five, six years is you do start to get a group of players who crave the big games. I know that sounds really odd but I think a little bit of that crept in.
“If you look at some of our best performances this season they have definitely been away from home in bigger pressure games when the pressure is on, big challenges. There is nothing in our form this season that says we should have gone to Gloucester and won with a team that was fairly changed up against a team that was becoming fairly dominant in the Premiership and really targetting the top four and we go there and win. We also go and beat Northampton.
“That was what our season was about. Our season became like that this year and I could kind of feel it starting to happen last year. We were looking for bigger games instead of just focusing on the here and now. That is partly what I am talking about when you think about the DNA of the group. When we were coming through the Premiership in our early years what you do is target your home games and we used to actually enjoy getting after our away games.
“At the start of our time in the Premiership if we got a point away from home that was as good as winning the game and we would celebrate a point away from home like we had won the game wherever we were, genuinely. One of our best team celebrations on a bus that I can remember was coming home from Northampton in our first season in the Premiership and we got a bonus point.
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“Chris Budgen scored a try at his old club in the last minute of the game that got us a losing bonus point and we strategised around doing that sort of thing – that was how we basically went away from home. A lot of that was in the DNA of the team that came through to become a top-four side, how hard and how focused you were on making every home game an impossible scenario for teams to win and then we used to just go after and enjoy and challenge ourselves in away games.
“It was hell for teams to play at Sandy Park and we had that in spades when we initially broke into the top four – it was one of the real things that kept us there and we kept hold of that for a number of years,” continued the long-serving Exeter boss. “Some of our best, massive performances were here at Sandy Park. Our semi-final against Toulouse in the European Cup will go down in a lot of ways as our best ever home performance. If you break it down, it was incredible.
“That has just ebbed away. What you have got to make sure is your mindset doesn’t become, ‘We’re quite good at home, those games will get won, we’re good at home’. These are just some of the little things that human nature just allows to happen. That might sound weird. I can stand in front of the team and go, ‘C’mon, we’re at home, this is what we build our season on and this is what it is all about’.
“But that actually has to be ingrained in you over a period of time, a ‘we know this has to happen’, and actually I think we do need to re-go through that process. You are 100 per cent right, we need to build that new group of players who understand if we are going to have a successful season we are very, very good at home first.
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“Then we start working out how we pick up our points away from home and have real fun going after those points. If we come home the following week whatever happens away, we are horrible at home and teams don’t want to come here. These are all part of the conversations we have had and the players are very aware of them.”
