'I looked at the clock, it said 18 minutes left, we needed 21 points'

Bristol director of rugby Pat Lam always believed his side could win after they producing a stunning fightback to beat Exeter 40-35 at Sandy Park.

Gabi Ibitoye scored an eight-minute try hat-trick as Bristol maintained their proud unbeaten Premiership away record stretching back to last November.

They looked dead and buried as Chiefs wingers Mani Feyi-Waboso and Paul Brown-Bampoe scored two tries apiece to put second-from-bottom Exeter 32-12 up with 18 minutes remaining and on the verge of their first win of the season.

But a hugely costly yellow card for replacement hooker Dan Frost four minutes later, for stopping a tap penalty being taken quickly, saw Bristol score 28 points while he was off the pitch, running in four converted tries, with Ibitoye getting three of them.

Lam said: “I looked at the clock, it said 18 minutes left, we needed 21 points, and I said ‘we can do that’. I sent that message on but the players were already talking about it. And I think we did it in eight minutes!”

“The players believe, don’t they? I think the belief comes from the evidence that you put into training, you put into having belief in the game.

“We know we are a fit side and we’re fit to play the Bears way, which is coming through strongly. I’m told it’s a record for Bristol scoring four bonus-point tries consecutively but we’ve got a lot of belief that we can score tries.”

On Ibitoye, Lam added: “He is brilliant, his work is great, he is one of the fittest guys in the league, but it’s about him staying in the game and he’s been doing it very, very well this year so far.”

Exeter director of rugby Rob Baxter admitted he had gone through almost every emotion possible during the course of the contest.

He said: “We are close to being a very good team but the bit we have got to get right is probably the hardest bit in professional sport, which is holding your composure together under pressure and not just multiplying issues. We had a lot of players multiplying issues for us today.

“It is not because they don’t want to win, or they don’t care, but they have just got to be able to clear their heads sometimes and do the right things.

“It was a little bit scary watching us after we got the yellow card. We started missing tackles and we looked flustered.

“I always said, even when we were in the top four and in finals, that the biggest challenge would come when you are not winning games and are bottom of the league.

“This will challenge us as a club and an organisation, how we promote ourselves and stick together, and we can either embrace it or run away from it and I am pretty comfortable we will embrace it and move forward.”

Exeter’s next match is away to fellow winless side Newcastle Falcons on Friday night.

Baxter added: “They will no doubt be rubbing their hands together saying ‘put them under a bit of pressure and they will explode’ but we have got to go there, free ourselves up a bit, play the right kind of game, and stick at it for longer than they do and if we do that we will win.”