Rob Baxter: 'There's a few good years left in me yet hopefully'

Wednesday at Sandy Park provided an excellent insight into just how enthusiastic Rob Baxter continues to be at the Exeter helm. It would be understandable if the prospect of a 16th consecutive season as the Devon club’s director of rugby is wearying on the 53-year-old but there wasn’t a scintilla of staleness to be detected on a busy midweek day.

With Chiefs’ open training session about to get underway at Sandy Park, Baxter was interviewed on the touchline and the fans assembled in the West Grandstand lapped up his every word. He watched some of the on-pitch activity that followed in preparation for Saturday’s pre-season doubleheader versus London Scottish and Cornish Pirates, then held a 40-minute round-table interview with the media that touched on a wide variety of topics.

Further business was on the agenda that afternoon, including a call with England boss Steve Borthwick on the new professional game board RFU/Premiership Rugby agreement that is set to be unveiled next month. In other words, it was all go and that continues to be exactly how Baxter very much likes it.

Asked by RugbyPass if he had done anything in particular to stave off any staleness creeping in, he said: “Not particularly. At the end of the season, I take a couple of weeks, a proper break. But I’m very fortunate in my role here, my job here – I’m almost like an Exeter Chiefs fan.

“Probably if I wasn’t working here, well I might not be one of the people watching today [Wednesday training] but I’d definitely be one of the people watching Saturday and I’d be sat with my mates who I used to play with and having a pint, sitting with my wife and we’d be enjoying the day.

“So I’m enthusiastic about seeing the team going well and the club go well as well. I’m fortunate in that way. I also think that sometimes we all need to stop and have a little bit of a word with ourselves. Like, there are 10 directors of rugby in the Premiership in this country, it’s a pretty privileged position to be in. If you get to the end of a season and go, ‘That was tough’ and you spend too long thinking like that, you need to have a bit of a word with yourself.

“I do the same as everybody else. I watch other sports. I watch films for ideas. We have taken a few ideas for a couple of things this season that probably resonate with us around young teams and people who achieve things they maybe didn’t think they could achieve.

“All that kind of stuff is still very interesting to me and, as I say, working with younger guys definitely keeps you a bit more enthusiastic and a bit more keen because they are a lot easier to work with, a lot easier to manage so that does keep things fresh definitely.”

It was 2009 when Baxter first assumed command, the club’s former lock graduating from his role as forwards coach to take over following the sacking of Pete Drewett. Life was certainly different, the then small business Chiefs being long-term Championship-level residents before a first-ever Premiership promotion was secured at the end of Baxter’s first season as boss.

“The first year in the Premiership it was Ali (Hepher) and I. So I was like a DoR doing recruitment, salary cap and bits and pieces but I did the forwards and defence as well. Ali did backs, attack, Ricky (Pellow) did some skills, Robin Cowling came in part-time from Truro College and did a bit of scrum and that was it, that was our coaching staff.

“Those first two, three years, there was a lot going on but in a different way. Now there is a lot going on because it is a much bigger club. We have just grown beyond all proportion. How we are and what we do and our staffing levels and all sorts, our academy. Everything has just taken off. It’s an ever-evolving role. I’m very lucky I work with very good people, so I’m still thinking there is a few good years left in me yet hopefully.”

Utmost in Baxter’s in-tray for 2024/25 following last season’s seventh-place league finish is adding a much-needed away-day layer of steel to his youthful squad. Double champions of England and Europe in 2019/20, trophies which proudly sit in their trophy cabinet along the corridor after you enter the ground floor main entrance at Sandy Park, last season was very much year one of a rebuild.

Stars such as Luke Cowan-Dickie, the Simmonds brothers, Jack Nowell, Stuart Hogg and others had all departed, leaving Baxter to give youth its fling. There was a Champions Cup pool win snatched at Toulon in December but that campaign ended with a 64-26 quarter-final hammering at Toulouse.

Their league effort also ended dismally, Leicester winning 40-22 at Welford Road. All six defeats on their nine-game Premiership road trip came bereft of a single losing/try bonus point and that lack of competitiveness was wounding as they finished six points behind the fourth-place Saracens in the play-off race.

“I’m not going to say we were completely inexperienced but you guys know the players we lost and the amount of experience they had, and you know how many guys came in and had their first full season which was probably 80 per cent of our regular squad.

“We were in with a fighting chance at the end of the Premiership and, to be fair, I’m wondering were we lucky in the fact that Sale went and won at Saracens. I’m wondering if our performance at Leicester, which was quite poor, would have hurt us a bit if qualification for the top four had been on it. For various reasons, we let ourselves down, and then the reality is we didn’t perform well away from home throughout the year. There is a reality there and I challenged the players at the end of the season…

“We can’t turn around and say we were happy with our away performance where other than the games we won, we didn’t pick up any other points. That is a stat that you look at and go, ‘Really!’ Every away point we got were in games that we won, we didn’t get a losing bonus point or a try bonus point in any game that didn’t go our way.

“You can clearly see we have got to establish something away from home that creates a bit of doggedness and a bit of harder to beat, collect points, however you want to look at it because, without doubt, you guys watched us in a 10-year period where we were getting to finals on a regular basis, it used to be rare that we didn’t pick up a point in every single game of the season.

“That was one of the things, if you beat us we still picked up something. There was one season we picked up a point every game we played. That starts to make you a tough team to beat. I probably didn’t realise it until someone said it to me, in a lot of matches last season we had 80, 90 per cent of teams who went out at Welford Road, Gloucester, all these types of places with players who had never played there before. That’s an element we will hopefully learn from.

“We have also taken the pressure off the players a little bit in that we are going to give them some very simple game plans and some very simple targets. We probably pushed the development of the team a little hard sometimes in that we wanted a bit much away from home which diluted the areas where we perhaps could have kept us in games for longer, created pressure.

“The reality is we go to Northampton in our first away game (on September 28), they are the reigning champions and we have got to do something that makes them feel like in that last quarter they could lose the game. That’s how we have had success before.

“The opposition starts to look around and get a bit edgy because you are within seven points and all of a sudden they make a few mistakes and you win the game. We have got to formulate our way back into that but I’m confident we can do that, I’m confident we have gained the experience in how we have to coach and in the players themselves.

“We can’t not be excited about the players and the potential we have got, but at the same time there is going to be a little pressure to collect points. That’s the beauty of the Premiership, we all start on zero and if you are looking around after week three and you have only got two or three points it feels a very difficult competition.

“I do feel we have got enough excitement within the squad, enough quality in the side to be very competitive in each game. We have just got to make sure we give the lads the opportunity to hang in there when it is tough and to really fly when it’s good. That is all I can really say.”

What should assist this process is Baxter’s previous experience of nurturing a young team into winners, as happened in their original evolution from Premiership newcomers to first-time title winners in 2017. The pattern of five different clubs being champions in the last five seasons is also a plus.

“The Premiership has changed a bit as a competition. It doesn’t look like a competition where you are going to get a lot of back-to-back finals or back-to-back winners. It’s been a little while now since that scenario seemed to be repeating itself and that will make it interesting again this year.

“Don’t forget we are building this team similar to how we built that team that got us to that first Premiership final in that we came into the Premiership with a relatively low budget, well below the salary cap. As our crowd grew, as the business grew and we developed Sandy Park, my playing budget grew, we grew the team with that and it enabled us to keep our best young players.

“We are probably back in that process in that we have had to cut our budget and we have cut our cloth accordingly for us to be getting back to making profit and the minute that happens the budget goes up and you start to move forward. My aim is to see our pathway follow the same path but the ingredients are there.

“We have a homegrown group who look like they are going to be here a long time plus we should have able to add and expand the squad as it stands now going forward. The squad as it stands now is not like, ‘That’s it, there is nothing more we can do, we’re stretching every penny out of the salary cap’.

“We are about as far from that as you can get so if our homegrown players all become internationals I would expect to be able to keep them all. There’s probably not a lot of teams in that position at the moment.

“We could go out and cherry-pick two or three very top-quality players if we feel it is necessary to add them as we did. We bought Nic White (in the past), which brought us on, we went and got Dean Mumm. We will be in a position to do that again as well which is all going to be part of the formula of improving a young team.”

So, where will Exeter sit when the dust settles on 2024/25? “It’s just so hard to predict. You look at the squads, at the teams who were contesting the final for example (Northampton and Bath), you can’t look at them and go, ‘They are not going to be good teams’ because they haven’t lost much, they have spent that extra time together.

“You do look at the teams who finish in the top half of the league and you go, ‘They are going to be very good teams’. The challenge for those of us who didn’t finish in the top half is how we improve and add to ourselves to break into that group.”