Saracens vs Exeter: Chiefs enjoy the fruits of hard yards at top of Premiership

Like the Premier League’s Leicester City, the Chiefs are the upstarts unexpectedly at the top of the table, threatening to upset the order. And it’s all down to work not cash

Olly Woodbury receives the congratulations of his Exeter Chiefs team-mates after scoring against Northampton in last week’s win (Getty)

A famous man once said that the world is full of willing people – some willing to work, the rest willing to let them. If Exeter cannot know for sure how long they will remain at their current altitude, peering down at their peers from the top of the Premiership table, they can at least take it for granted that when this World Cup-disrupted domestic season ends and the final accounting is done and dusted, they will be properly compensated for the sweat of their collective brow.

To a significant degree, they have already been paid – just as Leicester City, gatecrashing their way into the very exclusive private party held annually at the swanky end of the Premier League and all but mathematically assured of Champions League football next term, have received a good part of their due. Indeed, there are significant similarities between the two table-topping concerns: in both of our major winter sports, the blue-collar brigade are occupying the ground once held by the oyster-and-caviar types. Maybe there is a God, after all.

The 13-point advantage the Chiefs hold over fifth-placed Northampton with only five league games left on the list virtually guarantees them a first appearance in the play-offs. Furthermore, they have crossed a frontier by qualifying for the European Champions Cup knockout stage, and it is interesting to note that when senior people at Sandy Park look ahead to the quarter-final at Wasps in a fortnight’s time, there is no hint of trepidation in the air.

Wasps may be two-time champions and armed with a chequebook the size of an entire hedge fund, having secured themselves a licence to print money by buying the Ricoh Arena complex with all its commercial spin-offs and add-ons, but the West Countrymen have spent the best part of six top-flight campaigns proving that hard cash is not the only currency relevant to rugby success. Hard labour, together with a keen eye for sustainable long-term investment projects, is every bit as valuable.

Only this week, they confirmed details of the latest stage of a youth development programme already renowned throughout the rugby shires as a gold-standard operation. Exeter College now stands alongside similar establishments in Truro and Ivybridge as a centre of excellence. Jack Nowell, Henry Slade, Sam Hill, Luke Cowan-Dickie, Dave Ewers… the Devonians are as confident as can be that there will be more where they came from.

So when Exeter venture halfway round the nation’s motorway network for Saturday afternoon’s big Premiership game at Saracens – the defending title-holders are a couple points adrift in second place – they will do so convinced of their direction of travel, in all senses of the phrase. This sense of certainty has thrust Nowell, Slade and Cowan-Dickie into the heart of the England Test set-up and made Rob Baxter, the outstanding head coach, a hot favourite to head up the second-string Saxons’ trip to South Africa in June.

When the Devonians beat Bristol over two legs to win promotion in 2010 – an outcome that came as a rude shock to just about everyone outside the Baxter farmhouse on the edge of town – most observers assumed they would not trouble the power brokers for long. The likes of Bristol, Worcester and Leeds – the yo-yo clubs – had found it devilishly difficult to sustain themselves at Premiership level, and if clubs as strong in the fundamentals as Harlequins and Northampton knew what it was to be relegated, what price Exeter staying up?

Baxter knew different. “I think that from our perspective as a group of coaches, the important thing was not to look at two-year plans, or three-year plans, or five-year plans,” he said this week. “We’ve stayed focused on what we’ve been looking to achieve each day – to introduce new things at the right time, to identify bad habits before they became embedded and work out ways to rid ourselves of them. Of course, we needed longer-term staging posts in order to grow the club off the field, but the best way of giving Tony Rowe [the chairman, CEO and principal investor] the time and space he needed was to stay in the Premiership.

“While it’s always about striking the right balance between winning now and continuing to win further down the road, probably the best thing we did was to make a conscious decision that it would never be all about the next match. Once you focus solely on the opposition and how to beat them at the weekend come what may, you’re really making life hard for yourselves as far as creating a progressive club is concerned. A lot of promoted sides come up thinking every contest is really going to hurt, that there’s a battle around every corner. We took a different view: we saw every game as an opportunity for people to get better.

“Even when I was being called a fool for not specifically targeting our home games – for not identifying specific matches and resting our best men in between – I took the view that we needed the players to gain as much Premiership exposure as possible. There’s no short cut; you have to experience the hard things against the strongest opposition, to find a way through, learn from those experiences and build on the lessons.”

And how they have learned. In their second season among the elite, Exeter had the temerity to head into the last two rounds of regular-season games with a semi-final place for the taking. As it turned out, they lost a tight one with Northampton on home soil and finished fifth. On reflection, it was one of the better things that happened to them in those early days in the top echelon.

“That game showed us where we were – that we were not quite ready to move up to the next rung – and looking back, it gave us some clarity,” Baxter said. “We’re far more comfortable with where we’re at now. In fact, I’d say our second-half performance against Northampton just recently was as near to a faultless 40 minutes as I’ve seen us deliver.”

This ascent is giving Baxter and his fellow coaches more muscle in the recruitment market, particularly in the land of the Wallaby. The signing of the Australia Test lock Dean Mumm in 2012 may have been one of the half dozen most inspired pieces of business completed by any Premiership side – under Mumm’s captaincy, Exeter cemented their place in the big league – but there have been, and will be, others.

Some, like Mumm and next season’s green-and-gold signings Greg Holmes and Dave Dennis, were picked up straight out of Super Rugby; others, like the prop Alec Hepburn, the second-rowers Mitch Lees and Ollie Atkins, the flanker Ben White and the wing Lachie Turner, were recruited from other British or European sides. But they have this much in common, these Aussies. They fit Baxter’s idea of an Exeter rugby player.

“A lot of people assume that a lot of what we’re doing with the Australians is connected to Dean Mumm, and to a certain extent, a good deal of it is,” the coach said. “If I drop Dean an email asking him about someone he’s played with or against, I know I’m going to get a great indicator. But 90 per cent of the work is already done by that stage: our approach to character assessment is based on being willing to take the time to watch a lot of rugby. And, generally, it’s a player’s performance in defeat that proves most instructive, because it’s only then that you see the lengths people are prepared to go to on a rugby field.

“We know absolutely what we’re looking for in our players and it just so happens that the Australians we’ve signed show the values and qualities we think lay at the heart of our club.” Baxter then paused for a second before adding, with the snigger of a man who enjoys a pint of “apples”: “They tend to like a drink too, so they’ll always have a chance of fitting in here.”