Aviva Premiership: Can the Chiefs emulate Wolves?

Guinness Premiership / Ralph Ellis / 18 August 2010 / Leave a comment Free £25 Bet View Market

Can Rob Baxter keep Exeter up?

"Anybody taking a trip to Devon lightly might be in for a shock."

Exeter Chiefs' chairman may be grumlbing at the Premiership's elitism but their coach is determined that his side should mix it with the big boys, says Ralph Ellis.

Whenever a doubtful refereeing decision goes against them and apparently in favour of one of the so-called big clubs, the fans of Wolverhampton Wanderers FC sing a song that pours scorn on the Premier League (no, I can't tell you the exact words as they couldn't be printed on a respectable website.)

It always made me wonder why, if they think so badly of the competition, they celebrated so wildly when Mick McCarthy got them promoted into it, and then again when they stayed up last year.

So it's hard to have too much sympathy this morning for Tony Rowe, the chief executive of Exeter Chiefs, who is grumbling about how the 'old boys club' of Rugby Union's Aviva Premiership are making things so difficult for his newly promoted club.

"It's all geared up so that the longer you have been there the more money you get. Everything is stacked against us," he moans in an interview with the Daily Express's Rugby Correspondent Steve Bale.

What exactly did he expect? The top division in football was invented to keep all the wealth with the wealthy, and rugby union merely copied that model when they set up their own equivalent. It's why the new boys nearly always go back down - although Leeds Carnegie proved last year it doesn't have to happen (you might remember this column tipped them at good odds to stay up, incidentally).

The good news for the West Country club is that while the chief executive, who to be fair has pumped around £9million of his own money into developing a fabulous stadium on the edge of town next to the M5, is grumbling his head coach is taking a far more pragmatic view.

Rob Baxter has spent his entire career at the club and is more concerned at ways to stay in the Aviva Premiership than to moan about it. "Every rule that counts against us now will count for us if we stay in for five years," he says.

Baxter is a brilliant and as yet largely unheralded young coach, as he proved in the way he masterminded a surprise win over Bristol in the two legs of the play-off at the tail end of last season. He kept the game tight in the first leg, ran detailed analysis on Bristol's weaknesses, and exploited them all next time. Anybody taking a trip to Devon lightly might be in for a shock.

Whether that will be enough to keep them up is a different question, and their season couldn't have a tougher start with matches against first Gloucester then Leicester Tigers. But Exeter have spent their full salary cap of £4.23million, and former Harlequins scrum-half Junior Polu became their 11th summer signing yesterday. When the relegation market opens before the season kicks off on September 4 they could well be worth a long-odds punt to survive.

Mick McCarthy showed last year how a pragmatic coach can keep a team afloat among the big boys with humble resources - even if his fans did moan about the division. Baxter might just be capable of doing the same.

Five things you might not know about Rob Baxter

1. Born and brought up on a Devon farm rearing cattle and sheep, his dad John played more than 200 games for Exter as a second row before becoming club chairman.

2. Younger brother Richie still plays for the Chiefs at the age of 33, with more than 300 games behind him at number eight

3. Rob played for Exeter for 14 seasons - ten of them as captain. He studied sports science and took coaching qualifications at Exeter University while he was still playing

4. He's been head coach for two years

5. His CV now includes stints helping coach both the Barbarians, for whom he played a couple of times, and the Combined Services

Tags: Aviva Premiership betting, Exeter Chiefs, Harlequins, Ralph Ellis, Rugby Union betting