Rob Baxter admits to ‘wake-up call’ ahead of Exeter Chiefs European semi-final as next stage will ‘define’ season
Rob Baxter (left) believes his side's season will be defined by what happens next month
Exeter Chiefs director of rugby Rob Baxter believes his side’s season will be defined in the next month, despite their already vast improvement from last campaign.
The Devonians, despite reaching the PREM Rugby Cup Final, endured their worst-ever top-flight season in 2024/25, finishing ninth in the league and collecting just four wins from their 22 PREM and Investec Champions Cup matches.
However, in a stark contrast to their fortunes, Exeter head into the final rounds of the season hunting for silverware. At the time of writing, Baxter’s side sit fourth in the PREM table, and are in the midst of preparing for an EPCR Challenge Cup semi-final showdown with Ulster.
‘If someone said this time last year that we’d be chasing these things now, we’d have taken it’
“You look at the month of May, we go to Ulster away, Bath at home, Harlequins away, then a potential final and then one more PREM game in May; that’s it,” said Baxter. “The season now will be defined by the next month of fixtures.
“May will determine whether we feel really good about ourselves, OK about ourselves or if we feel bad about ourselves. It’s a really interesting scenario, this next month of fixtures.”
“It’s an interesting one. This is the funny thing with sport, it’s almost a ridiculous thing, but it’s the thing that attracts everyone. It would be disappointing if we don’t see something off or get to one big game.
“A semi-final is a big game, so I don’t want to underestimate that, but getting this far and then slipping up and not making the final or missing out on the top four would be disappointing because we’ve got to where we are now.
“But, if someone said this time last year that we’d be chasing these things now, we’d have taken it.
“I’ve got to stick with what I said in pre-season, and that was that we’d be competitive in every game,” he continued. “We’ve done that pretty well so far.
“The only promise I made to people was that you’d watch Exeter and we’d look like a competitive side. It would then be silly or childish of me to turn around (now) and say that’s changed.
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“We’ve been competitive in nearly every game, the PREM Cup final against Leicester was probably the only one where you see we weren’t competitive in that game, but every other game we have been because we’ve either won, drawn or taken points.
“The reality is, being competitive in every game has given us more opportunities to get more out of the season than what we’ve got now, so I’ll stick with that.
‘We maybe started to get a few plaudits before the event’
The turnaround in fortunes is still nothing short of remarkable, considering this time last year the Chiefs had just suspended long-standing coaches Rob Hunter and Ali Hepher in the wake of their 79-19 defeat to Gloucester, but nothing is guaranteed just yet for them.
Exeter’s latest Kingsholm defeat on Sunday leaves them just two points above fifth-placed Bristol Bears with five rounds of the regular PREM season to go, with Exeter arguably having the harder run-in too, while Ulster are currently unbeaten in Europe this season and head into Saturday’s semi-final as the second seed in the competition.
“This was the thing that worried me last week,” Baxter said. “Everything everyone was saying about us was really positive, and every interview the players were doing was really positive, but we still hadn’t played Gloucester. It doesn’t work like that. We maybe started to get a few plaudits before the event.
“We’ve got to roll our sleeves up and get back to our work, because that’s what’s created the season so far.
“Maybe you could say it (the loss to Gloucester on Sunday) was a wake-up call, but I think it was more of a reminder of just the things we’ve been focusing on all season and in pre-season were being done for a reason. Don’t go looking too quickly for other bits and pieces, and we probably had a few players who were guilty of thinking, ‘what’s the next thing we can add’.
“That’s a distraction, because the key things that we’d been doing well throughout the season are the most important things, and they have to happen before you talk about adding things on top. That’s the reminder we’ve had about keeping it simple and doing the things we want to do well.”
