It is always interesting listening to the thoughts of Rob Baxter and this week was no exception as the Exeter Chiefs boss spoke ahead of Saturday’s Aviva Premiership semi-final with Newcastle Falcons at Sandy Park.
Here is a full transcript of what he said at Wednesday’s press briefing.
Q - We will get to the game in a minute, but people like Thomas Waldrom and Lachie Turner, what sort of impact have they had and what tribute can you pay to these guys that are leaving the club?
Obviously they have had some fantastic individual input, but obviously the big, big thing here is the collective and the environment they have been a part of, helped to create and help drive and I think that is the thing that everyone gets the benefit of.
Tom, in particular, has been here for a long time now, he has had some huge individual performances and probably none bigger than last year’s final. For a man to stand up and make in excess of 30 ball carries over the course of that 100 minutes was something very special and you have to say that is an element of someone driving victory your way from pure physical and mental determination, but they have both had a huge impact.
We have been well aware of some of the moments that Lachie has created in the last few years where he has broken games open with moments of individual skill, but again, what people probably don’t see is that he is selectable for so many other reasons and the other reasons are that he is a very good defender, he is very good under the high ball and he helps cement the team together and those are the fundamentals we look for in a player first.
For me, it would be fantastic if the rest of the team can give them a great send off and obviously that will start this weekend with a big performance in the semi-final and hopefully that performance will lead to another appearance in the final.
Q – Obviously you can’t get too far ahead of yourselves, but from our perspective, Exeter Chiefs finished top of the table by a long way, you are playing the side that finished fourth in the table and the complacency for us is that you should be there (in the final) this year. How do you get that out of the players’ minds?
To be fair, I don’t think we have had to too much because the reality is that these guys have played in an awful lot of circumstances over the last two, three, four years, or five years for some of them and they have seen situations arise where a complacency can always hurt you, or a bit of your preparation is off it can hurt you, but they have also seen that of you can get your preparation right and you get your mental state right, your intensity right and you hit the pitch and really drive your game, then a lot of good things can happen, so we have seen both sides of the coin.
We certainly don’t look like a team that is going to be complacent, we look like a team that is going to go out there and give it a really good go and be there to fight and lay it on the line for the full 80 minutes. That is what you have to do.
Obviously we have had our usual look at Newcastle, as we would with any other side, they have obviously had a good season and to get into the top four is an achievement in itself. We are very aware of how hard you have to work to get into the top four, but what we have really focused on over the last two weeks is ourselves because, ultimately, by focusing on ourselves, it gives us the best opportunity to do what we want to do, drive our systems and our game plan and ultimately, that is what has made us a successful side so far this season.
Q – If you will indulge me for just a second: My complacency, Exeter are in the final, you go on to win the final, whoever that may be against. Would doing that this year be a much bigger achievement than doing it last year for the simple fact of defending the title?
I think that is a very difficult thing to talk about. Now, we are in preparation for a semi-final and I am not going to sit here and talk about what a winning a final would mean because the reality is that at this stage, it doesn’t mean anything.
We finished top of the Premiership and in five years, will anyone talk about Exeter being top of the Premiership if we don’t win it? Of course not. It doesn’t work like that and we are not going to talk about what the ifs, buts and maybes of winning successive Premiership titles would have been if we don’t win the semi-final.
We will start talking about how good an achievement it will be when it is an achievement that we actually deserve and can lay claim for. At the moment, we don’t deserve to start talking about winning back-to-back finals because we haven’t dealt with the next hurdle and that is Newcastle at home.
Fair Comment. Team-wise, selection problems because everyone is fit, or has anyone struggled this week and is not available?
We generally have problems every week We have had some tough ones this week that have become a bit tougher with even more guys becoming available and we are right at the end of guys coming back from little fractures and little breaks and we kind of knew this would be the scenario six or seven weeks ago that if we reached this stage, we would have to make some tough decisions on guys that are fit and available.
We have an awful lot of people out there running around having full training weeks that we haven’t had for a few weeks so selection for that reason has been very tough.
What it also allows us to cover now is if we do manage to overcome Newcastle this weekend, we also have some selection issues for next week as well, so they are nice problems to have. Selection can take a long time, but ultimately, we have picked players that have been successful for us so far this season and have decent game minutes under their belt and we feel are ready to go and play very well for the full game.
When you look at Newcastle and their rise in the English game so to speak, do you see parallels with what’s gone on here at Sandy Park?
Not really, I think it’s a different story. I think we have always been at pains here when people have tried to talk about copying the Exeter Chiefs model that it doesn’t really work for anyone else. We have never tried to copy anyone else, we have always talked about driving our own pathway and I think that is what Newcastle have done, really.
I think theirs is a different story, it is a different story when you have come out of the Championship because your goals in year one, year two, year three, year four, year five are all completely different to the challenges for a team that, before Dean Richards got involved, were in and around the bottom group and flirted with, or have been used to relegation. There is a different mindset in a side like that and a club like that, so the challenges are different.
Although there is a very loose alignment in that we have come from being a bottom third team towards being top four now and Newcastle have achieved the same, I think they have been achieved in different ways with different start points and with different challenges.
As for the end results and whether they will be the same, we don’t know, but to say it is the same is a bit over-simplistic.
You can probably relate to them reaching the top four for the first time and playing in a semi-final and that freshness and excitement that it brings to a club?
Oh 100 per-cent. I mean, the nice part about the excitement that it brings is that it brings it to your supporters and it brings a new experience to a group of players that want to keep moving forward, I am a big believer that playing in big games with good players against good teams helps you improve and that’s what Newcastle’s biggest target has got to be.
Coming here, their first target will be to win as that gives them the opportunity to say they have improved in a big game, that then gives them a final which gives them another opportunity to improve in a big game and that is very much how we targeted things.
I am expecting us, whether we win or lose this weekend, to put in a kind of performance both individually and collectively that all of our players can know that they are a better player because of the experience and because of what they have laid on the field.
Those are the targets that we still set ourselves on a week by week, month by month, season by season basis because they are the things ultimately the things that drive you to being successful over a longer period.
You reached this stage for the first time a few years ago now and have built step by step so to speak, is there almost a complacency that you have reached this stage – not necessarily from you, but you have to guard against a complacency within the squad to not take it for granted, perhaps?
You can’t run away from it. I think there is a complacency amongst other people and there are bound to be people that look at it and think: ‘Exeter don’t lose a lot of home games and history suggests the home semi-finalists tend to win’ and there are other things that you can look at and say it puts us in the box seat.
The reality is that most good sides and most grounded players deal with that pretty well and they understand that getting the foundations to a good training well and then understanding what you have to lay on the field, the intensity you have to bring, the individual commitment you have to bring . Once the guys know that, I think that it should get tough to be complacent and to be fair, if we go onto the field and we are complacent, we deserve to lose and I would have no complaints with that.
It’s obviously been a long hard season, but do you sense that excitement amongst the players? It is the business end of the season and it is win or bust now.
To be honest with you, I have sensed an excitement amongst the group for a few weeks. I think the lads are aware that the season is going well and we have known for a few weeks that the season was going to go beyond the end of the season.
So I think there has been a building of the excitement about being here and being at the club at this time. It doesn’t feel strange that we are in here now two weeks after the end of the season, it feels normal for us to be in training quite hard and looking forward to what the game will bring.
That’s a nice feeling to have as well, it doesn’t feel as though we have had to scratch around and create something new because we haven’t. Now it is all about staying mentally fresh and mentally ready to play the game on Saturday.
And what about you, do you relish these occasions?
I think it’s hard to say you relish them because the truth is you get a lot of your enjoyment and satisfaction after the games. During the game, there is a huge focus on how we are playing the game, is there anything we need to address.
In these big games against good sides, you don’t watch it and know after five minutes that you have won because it just doesn’t happen. What you have to do is watch the game and see a team driving itself minute by minute to know that over the course of 80 minutes, it will do enough good things to come out on top.
Those are the only things you can focus on as a coach, you can’t walk up there and think: ‘right, I am going to enjoy this’ because it just doesn’t work like that. You go up there, sit down, get focused and work out how you can win.
It’s different for the players on the field to the coaches, we may have to make some substitutions or a few little changes here and there, but on the whole, you generally leave it to the players and that is probably the toughest part of the job.
