Big battle set for Sandy Park as Exeter host Quins

The final round before the play-offs of the 2021-22 Premiership offers some juicy clashes, one of which sees Exeter Chiefs hosting defending champions Harlequins at Sandy Park. 

In third spot and a good nine points clear of Northampton, Quins are guaranteed a place in the semis, although the same cannot be said of their opponents, who, surprisingly, find themselves out of the running in terms of the Premiership, however,  much is still on the line for the Chiefs as they fight for a spot in next season's Champions Cup spot. 

Quins’ last encounter saw them put the Cherry & Whites to the sword, 28-24: 

Exeter found themselves on the wrong side of the scoreboard against Bristol Bears: 

From the coaches: 

Rob Baxter (Exeter): 

“We’re expecting them to come out flying at us,” he said. “They are a squad in a semi-final next week, who’ve not played for a while, so we’re bracing ourselves for what is coming. For us, it’s a great opportunity to go out there and show what we’re about. We’ve done a fair bit of talking these last few weeks during some of our reviews and now it’s time to see who will ‘walk the walk’. 

“In reviews there is always a lot of talk, now we’ve got to find who in the group will walk the walk. As I said, we’ve talked a lot recently about where we want to go and what we will need to do to achieve success next season. I’ve said to the players that we do need to leave behind the success of recent years as it’s not relevant for a lot of them. That said, we do have to use that recent success as markers moving forward. 

“If I take us back to that last season before we got into that first semi-final, we’ve got pictures of guys like Jack Nowell, Henry Slade and Luke Cowan-Dickie, all of whom look like young kids. For them, they were just getting their initial experiences in the Premiership around that time. 

“This season, we’ve got guys in our squad who are in a similar position. People like Sam Maunder, Josh Hodge, Dafydd Jenkins, Pat Schickerling, they’ve all come through. Tom Hendrickson has had a lot more game time, as has Richard Capstick. Others would have had it not been for injuries, guys like Rus Tuima and Sean Lonsdale. 

“You can’t tell me that when you talk to these guys about this season, yes they will be disappointed with where we are and not necessarily qualifying like we have in the past. However, they’ve all had real breakthrough seasons and benefitted from being exposed to playing in the Premiership and the Champions Cup. 

“The negative bit is there have been games where we could have played better and there have been results which we should have made go our way. Had we done that, then we would have kept the season a little bit more exciting for us, but we haven’t! 

“We can look at excuses, all kinds of things, and I’m prepared to put my own hand up and say we got things wrong, especially at the start of the season. I know we could have approached it in a bit more exciting fashion because there were a lot of changes, it was a different group of players, and we needed to reset our goals a bit. 

“As the season went on, the challenges never really got easier and we found ourselves desperately chasing points. We never really recovered from that and that’s where we find ourselves now. As I said, we know we could gave been better, but it’s happened now. Now, I don’t want to use hindsight to kill ourselves, I want us to use it to get better and already we’re going through that process really well.” 

Tabai Matson (Quins): 

“We’re in a great position this weekend to face a tough and proud team like Exeter as we build towards the semi-finals. With a few high-calibre players getting the chance to get back on the park this week, we have an opportunity to springboard into the playoffs. 

“Exeter serve as a great team to face before we head into the semis. The Chiefs will want nothing better than to finish their season with a strong performance against their final Premiership opposition.”