Rob Baxter relishing 'really exciting’ Exeter Cheifs project with aim to ‘rebuild’ double-winning team

Exeter Chiefs' Rob Baxter wants to emulate the club’s historic double-winning 2019/20 season as they take on an “exciting” rebuild.

Exeter have lost 11 players who featured in that highly successful campaign, where they won the European Champions Cup as well as the Premiership.

Ben Moon, Harry Williams, Luke Cowan-Dickie, Dave Ewers, Jannes Kirsten, Sam Simmonds, Jack Maunder, Joe Simmonds, Ian Whitten, Jack Nowell and Stuart Hogg all departed this summer, having made 1,976 Exeter appearances between them.

Baxter is relishing the challenge of transforming the squad as they seek to compete on all fronts once more.

“It’s really exciting for me as a coach, because you actually want to test yourself and see if you can do these things twice, for obvious reasons,” he told TNT Sports.

“Aside from that, those guys were always going to move on at some stage. They were getting to that tipping point where it was, ‘Is it one more contract or two more contracts?’ If we hadn’t have been in this situation now, we’d have been in it in three years’ time. That’s the reality.

“If we do it now, we can start again. We can see if we rebuild around that core of young, English, largely homegrown talent. That was the basis of the team that we grew that got to six or seven finals and won trophies.

“That’s what we’ve got to do. We’ve got to rebuild, give them the confidence, give them the time. As coaches, we’ve got to have some patience and work with them very hard individually to add the layers of experience that team had, and hope this team will gain over a number of seasons.”

On how he plans to rebuild the culture with the new and younger players, Baxter added: “Good cultures I don’t think are that difficult. If you’ve been in the game, you know the non-negotiables, you know the things that will help you have a good culture.

“But having a great culture, having 30 of your senior players so aligned, it doesn’t matter where they are in their career, what they’ve done in the past or where they’ve come from, they know they have to sacrifice a bit and have 100% commitment to the way to team are going to have that huge success, to win the trophies and gain international honours. Getting that takes time.

“You have to commit in lots of ways for the team to thrive and learning that is difficult and does take some time. Our job as managers is to work with them individually to help them understand how important they are to the team and how important they’ll be to our end goal.”

Exeter kickstart their Premiership campaign by hosting current champions Saracens, live on TNT Sports, with Exeter fielding a new look XV.

Baxter believes Exeter’s young back three of Josh Hodge, Tom Wyatt and Immanuel Feyi-Waboso are ones to keep an eye on during Saturday’s game and the rest of the season.

“If they can get some good balls in their hands, they can be dangerous. That’s the highlights of their game” he said. “Their communication around backfield coverage, how they work defensively, how they win kick battle situations in the aerial battle, that will be a great challenge for them.

“They’ve all got the skills to do that, and if they come through and shine today, that will be a big step forward in what they could potentially achieve as a group of three young men with a lot of potential.”

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