Exeter Chiefs to ‘stay focused’ on finding ‘super-strengths’ as captain lays out ambitious title hopes
Exeter Chiefs director of rugby Rob Baxter and captain Dafydd Jenkins have set their stall out ahead of the upcoming PREM Rugby campaign
If you had told even the bravest, most staunch Exeter Chiefs supporter this time last year that they would have reached the 2026 PREM final, they would have politely escorted you out of the Stand-Off.
To say the 2025/25 season was a nightmare for Exeter would have been an understatement. A last-gasp defeat to Leicester Tigers on the opening day of the season kicked things off, before a run of eight consecutive league defeats, including against a Newcastle side that had lost their past 25, pretty much ended their season before it had the chance to begin. The Premiership Rugby Cup, as it was then, offered a glimmer of hope, but a rampant Bath side quickly extinguished that in the final. I’m not even going to talk about that day in Gloucester, either.
That’s just on-field as well, and it came amid the backdrop of a major coaching overhaul as Omar Mounamie, Rob Hunter and Ali Hepher all departed.
To put it lightly, it was absolutely horrific, pretty much from start to finish.
‘We’re a team that’s very early on its path to being a successful side, I hope’
But that lit a fire in the belly. It created a genuine feeling of hurt, a feeling of ‘revenge’ as winger Paul Brown-Bampoe put it to Planet Rugby ahead of the season. Director of rugby Rob Baxter had only promised one thing: that they would be competitive.
That promise was certainly fulfilled. With interest.
A run of six wins and a draw from their opening nine PREM games got them off to a strong start in the league, before another block of five wins from eight saw them return to the play-offs for the first time since 2021. In that time, they also beat Leicester Tigers, Bath and Saracens. Exeter then defied the odds to beat Bath at the Rec in the semi-final too.
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It proved to be one hurdle too many at the Allianz Stadium, Twickenham, as Northampton Saints picked up the title in a 26-17 victory, but that probably didn’t matter to the bravest, most staunch Exeter Chiefs fan.
In the space of a year, the Devonians had flipped everything on its head.
“I was able to enjoy it (the off-season),” says Baxter. “It was slightly odd; we lost the final, but from most of my conversations with people, you’d have thought we’d won it! It was actually me going ‘yeah but, yeah but, yeah but’.
“We had a successful season in a lot of ways. To lose in the final was disappointing, but we had a good season and I probably had a good off-season.
“I didn’t overfocus on the final; I actually said to myself that I wasn’t going to spend hours and hours pouring over the final because I’ve done that in the past and it burns into your mind too much. You try to address things in pre-season that probably don’t need addressing. Just because there was something in the final, it doesn’t mean that’s the most important thing to address to move forward as a team. I’ve done that before.”
“We’re a team that’s very early on its path to being a successful side, I hope. What I don’t want to do is start one pre-season and set very clear principles on how we wanted to play but go into the next pre-season and say ‘now we’re going to do this because these are the four things we need to address to win the final’. The important thing was to focus on things that will still be our strength this season.”
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Reaching the final one year does not guarantee you will be in the mix again 12 months later, though. In the past, Exeter have bucked that trend in the past, of course, reaching six successive finals between 2016 and 2021, but this is a different landscape entirely. There have been five different champions between 2020 and 2026, with only Northampton winning the league on two occasions in that time, and eight different teams have made it to the big dance.
‘We got to the final doing a lot of good things’
If they want to make this a regular occurrence, rather than a flash in the pan, Baxter feels his side need to double down on the fundamental aspects of their game.
“It’s staying focused on the things that clearly made us competitive last season,” he details. “We got to the final doing a lot of good things, and most of those things I think we can still get better at. Last pre-season, we worked really hard on our runability and our speed of movement, and we’ve pushed on with that again this pre-season as we’re still progressing that.
“We were either the youngest or second-youngest team across the PREM when you look at the players who played last season, so there’s a lot of growth still in the group. We need to keep growing without trying to overcomplicate things. We’ve added a little bit in how we attack to try and challenge the players (at Exeter) as well as the opposition, but we haven’t tried to create this whole new way of playing because we’re not as good as we can be at the things we’re already doing.
“The more of our strengths we can turn into super-strengths, that’s the way you become a title-winning team. Northampton came through; they topped the league and won the title, but they know what their superpower is and have developed it for the longest period of time. That’s what it gives you, it doesn’t happen overnight, and that certainly won’t happen overnight.”
But what exactly is the aim for Exeter heading into the new campaign? It seems there’s only one thing on the players’ minds.
“There’s no other way around it, we’re going into it to win it,” says club captain and chief enforcer Dafydd Jenkins. “We’re going to do everything we can to put ourselves in the best possible scenario at the end of the season, we don’t want to do it like last year where we had to win four-from-four.
“It’s going to be a challenge. Every team in the league is a great team, and it’s going to be very attritional, but it’s an awesome league to be a part of.
“We’ve had a taste of the PREM final, but that hunger is still there. We want to do one better (this year). They’re not going to talk about who else got to the final; they’re going to talk about who won it. Northampton were an awesome team to win it, but we want to be that team.”
If you go into the Stand Off now and speak to that same bravest, most staunch Exeter Chiefs fan, they’d react in a very different way. Who knows, they might even get a round in to celebrate.
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