From eight straight defeats to Twickenham
Exeter lost their opening game of the previous campaign to Leicester at the death, then lost eight league games in a row. One of those defeats came against a Newcastle side that had lost its previous 25. The Premiership Rugby Cup offered a way out and Bath closed it in the final. Three coaches left the building along the way, with Omar Mounamie, Rob Hunter and Ali Hepher all departing.
Rob Baxter promised his players one thing for the season that followed: they would be competitive. They won six and drew one of their opening nine PREM games, added five wins from the next eight, and reached the play-offs for the first time since 2021. They beat Leicester, Bath and Saracens on the way, then went to the Rec and knocked Bath out of the semi-final.
Northampton ended it 26-17 at the Allianz Stadium. Baxter did not spend his summer replaying the tape.
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Baxter refuses to rebuild what works
“I didn’t overfocus on the final; I actually said to myself that I wasn’t going to spend hours and hours pouring over the final because I’ve done that in the past and it burns into your mind too much,” the director of rugby said. “You try to address things in pre-season that probably don’t need addressing.”
His squad was either the youngest or second-youngest in the league last season, which shapes the plan. Exeter worked hard on ball movement and speed of transfer in the previous pre-season and have pushed the same buttons again rather than inventing a new game.
“The more of our strengths we can turn into super-strengths, that’s the way you become a title-winning team,” Baxter said. “Northampton came through; they topped the league and won the title, but they know what their superpower is and have developed it for the longest period of time.”
Jenkins wants the trophy, not the story
Repeating a final appearance is no formality in this league. Five different clubs have lifted the title between 2020 and 2026, only Northampton have done it twice in that window, and eight different teams have reached the final. Exeter themselves once made six finals in a row between 2016 and 2021, in a very different competition.
Club captain Dafydd Jenkins put the target in plain language.
“There’s no other way around it, we’re going into it to win it,” he said. “We’re going to do everything we can to put ourselves in the best possible scenario at the end of the season, we don’t want to do it like last year where we had to win four-from-four.”
“We’ve had a taste of the PREM final, but that hunger is still there. They’re not going to talk about who else got to the final; they’re going to talk about who won it.”
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