Exeter ready for Saracens test

Editor

Exeter full-back Phil Dollman is determined to build on last week’s victory at Bath when they travel to Saracens in the Premiership on Saturday.

That historic win over Bath lifted Exeter up to third position in the standings but Dollman knows there is still plenty of room for improvement.

“We can take a lot of confidence from the Bath game. We didn’t perform but we got the result. We know we can perform better than that,” he told the Chiefs website ahead of the mouth-watering fixture at Allianz Park.

“We’ve played a lot better than that and come out on the other end of results.

“This week is probably a good one to look at things. We got the win and that felt great. But when you analyse things, there’s a lot there to be improved on and that’s a good way to look at ourselves.

“I wouldn’t have said there’s been an easy game for a long time. It does seem like the quality of the Premiership has taken a step up in the last few years.

“We’re hopefully making that step up again ourselves, stepping on from last year and improving as do the other teams so we’ve just got to try and improve a little bit more.

“It’s a big test against Saracens, they’ve proven their quality already this year and previous seasons. It will give us a good indicator of where we are. We’ve improved the last five or six weeks so we can go there and see what we are about.”

Saracens have been dominant over Exeter of late having won their last four meetings and Dollman stressed they must be on form throughout the game if they are to stand a chance of breaking that drought.

“It’s that 80 minute performance,” he said. “Whenever you play Saracens if you don’t put in an 80 minute performance you’re going to find it tough to get a good result against them because they go again and they are looking for errors off you all the time so we’ve got to be very clinical.

“If we can stop them playing our game, maybe we’ll get the ball back and launch against them and get on the front foot.

“They’ve got a strong kicking game with a strong chase but a lot of teams have in the league. We’ve got to front up to start with because if they get on us physically then you are in for a tough day. They played well against us last year, they really exposed us defensively so we’ve really got to be on our mettle.”