'Big and abraisive' - Rob Baxter looks ahead to Leicester clash

Exeter Chiefs get their season underway on Saturday as they welcome the 2022 Premiership champions Leicester Tigers to Sandy Park.

This will be a key year for the Devon-based side after finishing down in 7th place last season as they look to continue their rebuild back to the Premiership giants of 2020.

Despite their lower league standings in last year’s competition, many have suggested that the Chiefs’ performances and impressive grit deserved much more. Moving a further year into their construction, few would bet against them to provide a much stronger challenge this season.

With just ten teams in the Premiership, the challenges appear to be getting tighter and tighter, with each game getting harder to predict. So with this in mind, Rob Baxter’s first game in charge this season will not be easy.

“They’re always big and abrasive,” Baxter said about Michael Cheika’s Leicester.

“That’s very much what he [Cheika] wants to rebuild at Leicester. He wants to rebuild that tough gritty forward play that they’ve been renowned for over the years, so we’re assuming that there’s going to be a lot of that happening at the weekend.

“Obviously we’ve watched their preseason games, they performed very well a week or so ago against Scarlets.

But how does Baxter and his team counteract this physical challenge?

“It’s always challenge in the contact area, it’s always a challenge in the physical department. We probably let ourselves down tactically a fair bit of the end of last season. We were good against them at home, but away we made some significant errors and we lost a lot of ball. We then made significant errors around our set piece and giving up pens and knocking on the ball.

“We understand that we’re going to need to have control of the possession far better than we did at the end of last season. I think control of our possession is probably going to be key throughout the game, so something that we’re really talking about is how we look after ball, and how we do things with the ball, and that will give us the best chance of winning the game.

To sum up, Baxter added that the Chiefs need to “focus on ourselves, as much as worrying about Leicester.”

Injury updates:

Promising youngster Zack Wimbush has been ruled out of the early stages of the season while he recovers from a foot injury.

“Zack Wimbush has a foot injury. We’re still waiting on a surgeon’s input on that, but it looks unlikely that’ll need an operation and that’s just going to have a rehab period.”

Baxter has also given injury updates on the backline trio of Tamati Tua, Henry Slade and Tommy Wyatt.

“They could all be in and around the same period, which is around that Autumn international/Prem Cup period; that’s what we’re hopeful of. Some guys might be a couple of weeks forward or a couple of weeks back, but we’re talking roughly this timescale for those three.”

Outside of that, Baxter said his players are ticking along nicely, with just the odd bump and bruise to be expected from a good physical encounter against Ulster last weekend.

Exeter Chiefs will play Leicester Tigers at Sandy Park on Saturday the 21st of September at 15:05.