Rob Baxter hoping success breeds success, but he won't let Exeter Chiefs rest on their laurels like last season

Reigning Premiership champions begin the new season at Gloucester, but their director of rugby tells Jack de Menezes they need to escape relegation before thinking about the title

Rob Baxter believes Exeter must use last season's Premiership victory to build future success (Getty)

There’s something quite fitting about Exeter Chiefs getting the new Premiership season underway on Friday night. After all, it was their incredible comeback victory in last season’s semi-final that knocked out Saracens in order to reach Twickenham, and it was the Chiefs again who lit up the final by taking it to extra-time before seeing off Wasps with a late Gareth Steenson penalty.

They take on Gloucester, West Country rivals, at Kingsholm to raise the curtain on the new campaign, but they do so with expectations and targets differing enormously.

The Exeter director of rugby, Rob Baxter, makes it abundantly clear that in order for last season’s title triumph to become a true success, the club must push on and continuously challenge for silverware, both at home and in Europe. But that does not mean the Chiefs should go into the new campaign expecting to win it again – far from it, in fact – as Baxter explains when asked if it’s a case of finishing inside the top four before setting sights on the title.

“I’ll be honest with you, I think it’s a little bit more basic than that,” Baxter tells The Independent. “The way we’ve approached to being champions is to say ‘how do champions prepare today?’. You know what you had to go through to get there last season, how tough it was, you know how hard you have to work, so how should you train today, how are you going to make that thing a possibility again by what you do today?

“So we’ve actually pulled it back even further than saying ‘let’s get top six, and then top four’. We will knock those markers off as we go through the season hopefully, but the first marker that we’ve got to knock off is getting out of the bottom of the league. You’ve got to be away from the bottom and out of the pressure of relegation first. Tick that box off first, then you start ticking off boxes like top six and European competition, then drive yourself into that top four. There are lots of little steps and markers that you have to go through to get to where you eventually want to be.”

That may seem a slight exaggeration on what Exeter should expect at Sandy Park this season, but it only takes a glimpse at the league table come Christmas to see what the Chiefs were facing. By their standards, a run of four league defeats in their opening eight games representing a poor return, given they were coming off their first visit to the Premiership final, and it took a clear-the-air talk between the entire squad to turn their season around.

Baxter has no intentions of repeating this early-season slump. The former Exeter captain, who also had previous roles at the club as a ball boy and scoreboard changer, has endured a busy summer, but not in the way that you’d expect.

Baxter led Exeter to their first ever Premiership title (Getty)

While his equivalents at the likes of Saracens and Leicester Tigers have been busy scouting and signing players, Baxter has been focused on matters closer to home. “It was a busy summer! But it was a nice summer,” he adds. “I didn’t go away this summer because my daughter was doing her A-levels and my son was finishing his exams for his degree in his finals, so it wasn’t a good summer for us in a lot of ways. We played the final, my daughter started her exams that week and then she was doing that for a month and next thing it’s pretty much pre-season.”

But big-name signings have never been Exeter’s thing. “Retention” is the word that Baxter preaches, and it’s the ability to keep the young players who have the potential to develop and improve the first team.

“That’s one of those reasons where you’ve got to make sure winning finals helps you, so you’ve got to use it to make sure you’re more attractive to better players and have more success at the club,” Baxter adds. “That can be achieved in all kinds of ways, but – and I say this a lot – the most important thing before you spend loads and loads of energy, time and money on searching the world for recruits, is to make sure your retention is good and retention in a way is the thing that helps recruitment the most because if you retain the right players, you retain the guys who are the right age and are going to come through and be competitive and challenge for a place in the first team.

Then your recruitment can be very targeted on one or two players in one or two key positions, and I think that is why I don’t put everything around recruitment. I like to think we recruit well, but a lot of our recruitment is based on players who will potentially come through. We very rarely recruit high-end starters, that’s part of it.

“You start to work through the guys who pushed in from lower leagues, from outside the group – and there’s a lot of them: Ollie Woodburn not getting a lot of starts for Bath, James Short not getting a lot of starts at the clubs he ended up at after Saracens – and you look at it that way, that’s a key part of our recruitment, the retention of everybody else.”

It’s a tried and tested plan for Exeter, but it’s also one that can risk losing them ground on their rivals if their big-name recruitment pays off. But, for now, Exeter are the kings of the mountain, and if you come for the king, you better not miss.