By Mark Stevens

2/9/17

Exeter Chiefs Director of Rugby Rob Baxter refused to be too downbeat despite seeing his side slip to a last-gasp defeat at the hands of Gloucester on Friday night.

In their first league outing since lifting the Aviva Premiership crown back in May, the Chiefs were undone right at the death at Jason Woodward stole over for a dramatic winning try to give the Cherry & Whites a 28-21 victory at Kingsholm.

With little to choose between either side in a pulsating Round One encounter, Baxter saw plenty in his side’s display to give him encouragement moving forward.

“Overall it’s about par for us, we haven’t won many opening games all that often. Going away from home getting a bonus point, most of the time you call that a par performance,” said Baxter.

“I’m actually pleased with large parts of what we did. I thought our physical endeavour was very good and we looked like we had fuel in tank for large parts of the game.

“Am I frustrated with other areas of our game? Yes, I am. I thought defensively we didn’t look quite as excited as we should have been. We looked quite excited when we had the ball and worked hard with the ball going through multi-phases, but defensively we were a bit passive and it took us a while to find some really good defensive energy. That frustrates me a little bit, just because ultimately that was the key for the field position that Gloucester scored their points from.”