Rob Baxter praised his young side’s competitive edge and their ability to learn from mistakes after their comfortable victory against Gloucester.
“We probably are overachieving a bit”, he said. “But probably more in other people’s minds than our own. In our own we just want to be competitive all the time and win every game.
“I could say ‘we’re fighting’, but we’ve never talked like that as a club. It’s been in our DNA as a club that we’ve fought for everything.”
“Just before the game I said: ‘We’ve got some choices here guys, we can keep saying we’re a team that’s learning or we can actually start to put it into practice on the field’.”
Chiefs came into the game following back-to-back defeats, suffering a brutal 64-26 loss to Toulouse in the Champions Cup quarter-finals before seeing their play-off hopes take a big dent with a 26-14 defeat at home to Bath.
Given the expectations for his squad were low this season much of the discourse has been that a loss is fine and a lesson is learned, but it’s a discourse Baxter is keen to avoid to ensure progression.
“The pleasing thing for me today was that it felt as though the mistakes we made, were what we said we were going to do, which I can live with”, said Baxter. “What gets hard is when you get distracted, knocked off course by the opposition or even by yourselves.
“Today, we didn’t get distracted with any pressure that was in the game, or scoreboard pressure.
“People can see that they’re not just lessons but that we are learning from it, moving forward. We looked like a team that was learning, and was capable of putting it onto the pitch.”
With hopes of qualification for the Champions Cup now gone with the Cherry and Whites rooted in ninth, Gloucester boss George Skivington conceded that it had been a poor league season.
But with the club having won the Premiership Cup earlier this year and still in the hunt for the European Challenge Cup, Skivington was relatively happy with the season overall and what is to come in the last few weeks.
“I definitely won’t be happy with the league regardless of what happens this season,” he admitted. “In the end there’s three trophies you can go after in a year, if you get one, you’ve achieved something.
“We did set out to get the Prem cup and we got it, does that make the Prem form okay? No. In the end, there’s some success this year but it’s probably a real season of some highs and lows.
“We’ve definitely been through the mill as a group and come out of it which is a real positive, without anyone really floundering or moaning.
“It’s a balance – you win some silverware when there’s only three cups to be won, you don’t do so well in the prem and that’s obviously disappointing. There’s going to be a lot for us to review at the end of the season but we’ve got a massive game next week, we’re still in the fight for that, and that’s exciting.”
Written by Tom Jeffreys
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