‘It will stay in my mind for a long time’ – Rob Baxter reflects on Gloucester ‘pasting’ as Exeter Chiefs mount charge for redemption
Exeter Chiefs return to Gloucester for the first time in the PREM since their 79-17 defeat last season.
Everyone connected with Exeter Chiefs remembers what happened the last time they ventured to Kingsholm to take on Gloucester.
April 27, 2025 was the date. 79-17 was the score. Gloucester were magnificent. Exeter were abysmal.
The Cherry and Whites simply ran riot on the pristine Kingsholm turf that day. 13 tries, courtesy of 10 individual scorers, felt like just reward for both their intensity and their ability, but it could so easily have been more, too.
Conceding 13 tries in a game was simply unheard of for an Exeter side that prided themselves on being hard to beat. The golden generation would have barely conceded 13 tries in a season.
Somehow, though, it got worse after the full-time whistle, with long-standing chairman Tony Rowe storming into the changing rooms to spray his players. You couldn’t hear the words coming out of his mouth, but the image was one that reverberated across the game. It was an image of a club in the doldrums.
‘It will stay in my mind for a very long time, what happened up there’
Everyone connected with Exeter Chiefs will want to forget what happened that day.
But they will soon have their chance at redemption, as now, in a bizarre twist of fate, Exeter return to the scene of the crime this Sunday.
The date? April 26, 2026. Virtually a year to the day.
“They gave us a pasting,” Chiefs director of rugby Rob Baxter reflected. “That is still very fresh in my mind.
“To be honest with you, it’s still fresh in my mind. It will stay in my mind for a very long time, what happened up there. I’m not going to run away from that, as we have to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
“It’s never one thing,” he continued. “It was a culmination of a lot of things. We weren’t having a great season anyway, and we were looking at changing a few things around how we played and our approach to the game. Rob Hunter was also switching his role and Ali was moving into the academy.
“The week before we went to Gloucester, we played Bath (at Sandy Park) in the league and played pretty well against a team that was looking pretty dominant in the Premiership. We got the score pretty close, and maybe even have had an opportunity to win, and as a group, we felt like we’d turned a corner a bit and had found some answers.
“That feeling then eroded the quality of the training week and eroded getting the prep right the day of the game. When I interviewed the players afterwards – the first thing I did on the Monday morning was talk to the players who played – it was pretty clear that they hadn’t realised they weren’t getting their prep right.
“Then the game started poorly, and we got ill-disciplined and created a lot of the momentum issues ourselves, and I’d like to think we’ve got on top of that.”
‘Sometimes you need to hit the bottom before you start to climb back up again’
The loss a year ago turned what was already a difficult season into an outright catastrophe, and soon enough left Exeter with existential questions. Within hours of the game, coaches Rob Hunter and Ali Hepher were suspended from club duties with immediate effect. They were later sacked.
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“It was a massive change when you think about how long the coaching staff had been together; it was just a tough week. But I think, in hindsight, we dealt with it as well as we could have done, because our next two performances straight after were pretty good. The lads stood up pretty well, and that created a foundation for us going into the pre-season that we’ve pushed on from,” Baxter continued.
“The whole thing was (a turning point). Sometimes you need something very abrupt; sometimes you need to hit the bottom before you start to climb back up again. The whole day created that.”
Hunter and Hepher were nearly joined by Baxter himself, who admitted he considered his own future as well.
“I’ve said this before, but of course I did,” he said. “I got on the bus and I started doing what I normally do, but I was sitting there going ‘oosh, what’s the way forward now’. At the time, I was probably thinking that we had a pre-season and could turn things around, but that was maybe me being naive at the time. It was one of those things, and I think you’re not human if you can’t open your eyes and see what’s going on.
“The challenge is you’ve got to decide how you confront it, and for me personally, I confronted it honestly with what I thought we needed to do. The next training day we were in, I was very blunt and honest with the players, and we just moved forward.
“Perhaps those were the tough conversations we needed to have earlier in the season that we didn’t. One of the things you do when there aren’t many positives is to try and find them, but sometimes you try too hard to find them rather than addressing the negatives head-on.
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“It can either make or break a group, but I had one option, which was to go down the brutal honesty route regarding our training quality and performance levels. Luckily, it didn’t break the group; it brought the best out of them.”
‘We need to make sure we don’t make those again’
Baxter isn’t wrong there, with Exeter emerging from the rubble of that Gloucester defeat a team reborn.
The Chiefs find themselves right in the mix for a historic domestic and European double this campaign. At the time of writing, Exeter sit fourth in the PREM table heading into the final five rounds of the regular season, while also booking a spot in the Challenge Cup semi-final as well. Within that, the Chiefs boast a strong run of five wins from seven games.
Despite their rapid improvements this season, the defeat against Gloucester still lingers over them, but this weekend is a chance to right that wrong.
“It’s difficult,” Baxter explained. “You can easily say yes (to thinking Exeter owe Gloucester one), but I’d say we owe ourselves and show ourselves in a better light than on that day. I said to the players that we got things wrong in the build-up to that game, so we need to make sure we don’t make those again.
“You have to use every experience you pick up as motivation; you have to use it. I’d like to think we have some lads who were involved in that game who it might be driving them every game, not just when we play Gloucester.
“It was a tough day, and sometimes you learn your biggest lessons on those days and you decide you’re not going to let them happen again.”
Everyone connected to Exeter Chiefs remembers what happened the last time they went to Kingsholm for all the wrong reasons, but they will hope this upcoming trip is remembered for all the right ones.
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