Exeter Chiefs concentrating on the basics as they muscle out the Aviva Premiership elite The answer lies about two feet in front of me. Baxter is a deeply impressive individual, grounded, no-nonsense, a little brusque at times, but a man with an instinctive understanding of what makes a rugby club and a team function. This is an organisation which deconstructs rugby back to its elements, an outfit which believes that if you put the effort in, get on with, and appreciate, each other, then the rest is pretty much irrelevant. If Exeter were a film, it would be Forrest Gump. I asked Baxter if he enjoyed cracking the whip. I'm a big believer in working hard because the truth is we haven't that many players who can score us an easy try. We don't have players who can conjure something out of nothing. Because of that they have to work hard, and to do that they have to be fit and they have to be strong. They have to be able to deal with 80 minutes of flat-out rugby so we have to be hard on them in terms of conditioning and setting standards and the things that really matter. So, in that sense, yes, I am a hard taskmaster. But if we lose, do I blame them? Never, provided we've given it a genuine go. Can they celebrate a victory with a couple of beers? Of course they can. Must they understand that they're in the spotlight and need to be examples to the community? I'd like to think that the guys enjoy playing for Exeter. We talk a lot about enjoying what we do, enjoying the big games and the big moments and how that brings the best out of us. As with Sir Ian McGeechan and his take on the Lions last week, as with Lancaster's England, Baxter gets that personal chemistry is as crucial, more so probably, as talent. "I like my players," Baxter said at one point in the conversation, a sentiment I'd never heard a coach of any kind articulate before. What would make you not like them was the obvious response? If they lost the understanding of what it is to be a good member of a team. If I believed a player had shifted to a position where he thought, "What's in this for me? What can I get out of this? I wouldn't like that. And I know there are players out there motivated by that, and it doesn't make them bad players, but I would find managing them challenging. I like to see the guys walk in with a smile on their face and start talking about what they did over the weekend. I like to see that they're interested in being together and that they will go out onto the rugby pitch and start kicking a football around and having a laugh. How, then, would he set about integrating the mavericks? Maybe you don't bring them in. You have to make some tough choices. If I met someone who I felt wouldn't fit in, no matter how good a player he was, I'd go off him pretty quickly. "I've never brought a player in and thought, "This guy's just a nightmare. Let's get rid of him. We've never cut a contract short at the club. Is recruitment the biggest part of the job of a Premiership director of rugby? Get the right guys and the coaching becomes simpler. The key to being a good coach is having good players. There's a lot of truth in that. But there's more now to Exeter than collective resolve. I watched them in their first ever Premiership game against Gloucester at home, and when you stripped away the emotion of what was a famous win you were left with a wretched Gloucester display and an Exeter performance which began and ended with the back five of their scrum and a reliable goal-kicker. Two seasons on and they are different. They are still purposeful, defensively energetic, heavily reliant on a power-based game, but there is a sophistication and an awareness which has come with experience. That, maybe, is Baxter's most remarkable achievement. He has retained the boneheaded cussedness and grafted on greater understanding of different ways to win rugby matches. "I'm not a big fan of statistics," Baxter said. I don't think they tell you anything. We spent hours and hours looking at all the stats you can produce and there isn't one stat other than the scoreboard which tells you who wins. We change a lot of things here. We do a lot of things wrong, but we put them right pretty quickly and we don't dwell on it. I don't mind telling our pack we're not going to do that anymore because it doesn't work. I'm not trying to prove a point. Press Baxter for an example to flesh out that position and he thinks for a moment. We do a lot of work on mauls. Who stays in control of the ball? Is it the first guy, or does he pass it back one player, or do we chain pass it back through three players? Do we jam the openside first when we are setting up, or do we take care of the closed side? That's the sort of thing I mean. We bounce through the options and we don't ram stuff home if it isn't great. We do that with elements of our attack too. We'll give a move or a strategy a good go for a few weeks and if it doesn't work it goes in the bin. The result is a hugely competitively side. So far this season Exeter have picked up a losing bonus point in seven of their eight Premiership defeats to sit alongside the 12 victories, their only significant reversal a thumping 33-3 away catastrophe at Northampton in October. If there was a turning point in our season, it came with the loss against Bath at home in February where we felt our way through the match and attempted to squeeze out a victory. We sat down as a group afterwards and said that we would go after games. We made the switch to becoming more ambitious, seeing what we could achieve rather than worrying that we could get relegated and that this could get taken away from us. Wanting to be in the Premiership was a big motivation for players who had been in the Championship for five years. Now we talk to the guys about whether they can get international caps. Saracens did it. Saracens had a side that didn't have many international players. You win the Premiership. You get a few. The statement is delivered matter of factly and without a trace of smugness, but it is impossible to mask the astonishment. In a corner of deepest, darkest Devon, Baxter is openly anticipating a scenario which sees his team, two short years on from rubbing along with the flotsam and jetsam of the Championship, competing in a Premiership final and his players catapulted into the Test arenas of the world. Far-fetched? This season, absolutely. But in the future, who knows? As Baxter says, "If the players stay grounded, stay true to who they are and what we are about as a club, we're going to be pretty solid, and when we're solid we're in there in every game we play."