More still to come from Chiefs - McMahon

By James Fowler
25/2/23

Exeter forward Edel McMahon believes there is still more to come from this Chiefs side, despite the dominant form they have shown with 10 consecutive bonus point victories in the Allianz Premier 15s.

The Irish international has made a real impression since arriving from Wasps back in the summer, and the player nicknamed ‘Tricky’ is keen to make sure her side start ‘firing on all cylinders’ moving forward through the rest of the season.

“When we’re not playing our best rugby, we’re still coming away with really good scores and still racking up a bonus point,” she said, “When you know you're not playing your best rugby and you’re still producing scores like that, it’s quite good and it definitely keeps us in check to know what we can do when we’re firing on all cylinders.”

One of the key strengths for the Chiefs throughout the season has been the quality of their set-piece, however despite this the line-out was unusually sloppy during parts of the victory over Worcester last weekend. McMahon believes this was only a temporary blip and was keen to make sure the issues which occurred against Worcester are not over analysed.

“We don’t over analyse what we have or haven’t done, it was one game in the season that things didn’t go our way and on average our set-piece is our go to,” she added. “Sometimes you have to look back at that game and go that just wasn’t us and not over analyse it and just focus on going again, so that’s all we’ve done this week. We’ve repped out our usual set-piece that we have and I’m confident that we’re going to get good reward from it again this weekend.”

Looking ahead to today’s encounter with Loughborough Lightning, McMahon says that although she’s expecting the East Midlanders to come to Sandy Park full of confidence having downed the Sale Sharks last weekend, she’s confident that her side will put in a strong performance in front of a big home crowd.

“Loughborough are coming off the back of a win over Sale, so they’re going to come here with a bit more confidence, but to be fair Sandy Park is a hard place to come and I suppose we’re going to focus on us.

“They (Loughborough) came out of the blocks first time round when we beat them back near the start of the season, but they scored first with a solid maul try, but then we flicked a switch and showed them what we could really do and we’re hoping to do that again. They’ll definitely test us in defence because they like to play with width in their attack and the backline is quite rapid as well. But all focus on us and getting our stuff right and we’ll be confident that we should put out a good performance.”

With Sandy Park producing some of the biggest crowds in the Allianz Premier 15s league, you can understand why the players enjoy playing there so much, and McMahon is certainly no exception describing it as ‘class’ playing in front of such passionate home supporters.

“It is class, I’ve said it a couple of times that every time we play here no matter what the numbers are, whether they’re up in the thousands or a couple of hundred they are loud and they’re really really cool, so it’s class to play here.”