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'To be honest with you, I think it will stay in my mind for a long time'
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Rob Baxter admits that he considered his Exeter Chiefs future in the wake of last season’s 79-17 humiliation against Gloucester, and he hasn’t been shy about talking about it in the build-up to Sunday’s visit to Kingsholm.
It will be 364 days since the Chiefs leaked 13 tries, sparking a revolution which saw Baxter return to front-line coaching in the aftermath and cost head coach Rob Hunter and attack coach Ali Hepher their jobs.
Almost a year on, the Chiefs have reached a Challenge Cup semi-final and are fourth in the Gallagher PREM table, while the Cherry and Whites, who went fifth, are eighth with 16 points from their 13 games this season.
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“Of course I did (questioned his future). I’ve said this before, of course, you do. I got on the bus and started doing what I normally do, the individual codes and bits and pieces.
“But you are sitting there going, ‘ooh, what’s the way forward now? We’re just a couple of weeks away from the end of the season, and if we can get to the pre-season, we’ll turn quite a few things around.’
“Maybe that was me being a bit naive at the time. You’re not very human if you can’t actually open your eyes and see what’s going on. The challenge is you’ve got to decide how you confront it, and for me personally, I just confronted it honestly.
“It was a massive change, you think about how long the coaching group have been together, and probably it was a tough week, in hindsight, we’ve probably dealt with it about as well as we could have done. Because our next two performances were pretty good.”
Baxter says that he won’t be hiding away from last season’s result in the build-up to this game, even though it flies in the face of the modern way of coaching, which is to forget about it and move on.
“They gave us a pasting. So that’s still very fresh in my mind. I said to the lads, the modern way coaching is to sometimes put bad experiences behind you and move on and just get yourself in a fresh mindset.
“And to be honest with you, I think it will stay in my mind for a long time, what happened up there, and I’m not going to run away from that because we’ve got to make sure that doesn’t happen again. If we show up not ready to fully commit, physically and emotionally, to this game, we’ll lose. We’ve got to talk about it because otherwise we’ll get things wrong.
“It’s not so much about owing them. I think we owe ourselves. We know ourselves, we owe ourselves to show ourselves in a better light than we turned up that day. I’ve said we clearly got things wrong in the build-up to that game.
“So let’s make sure we don’t make those mistakes again. I don’t mind referencing it plenty of times this week. So don’t get tired of me saying it; we got things wrong at this stage of the season last year,” he told RugbyPass.
