Yeandle ready for Premiership scrap

By Mark Stevens
31/3/22

Exeter Chiefs club captain Jack Yeandle says he and his team-mates will be ‘scrapping for everything’ in their quest to ensure a successful conclusion to the season.

With just four games left for the Devonians in the regular Gallagher Premiership season, Yeandle knows there can be no room for slip-up if his side are to reach the end of season play-offs.

Last weekend’s 22-17 loss at home to league leaders Leicester Tigers has heaped further pressure on the Chiefs, who know they must not only win their remaining four games, but also hope that their rivals around them slip up at some stage in the process.

“I don’t know the full mathematics of it all, but I know it’s not in our hands anymore, which is disappointing,” said the experienced hooker. “What we have to do is bang in some results, but we have got to get every single point that we can. We have to be willing to scrap for everything because we know it’s going to be tough.”

Next on the agenda for the Chiefs is Saturday’s visit of Westcountry rivals Bath to Sandy Park (3pm) and Yeandle knows that will be no walk in the park.

“If you look at their recent results, Bath have really kicked on from where they were a couple of months ago,” added Yeandle. “They got a good draw with Sale last week and you can see they have really turned the corner. I’ve no doubt they’ll be coming down here with nothing to lose, so they are going to be dangerous opponents.

“What we have to do is address the issues we had from the Leicester game and learn from them.”

In what was a second successive league defeat for the Chiefs, Yeandle was quick to address the concerns that came from that game with the Tigers.

“We were our own worse enemies, especially in the first half,” he explained. “The strong words after the game, they didn’t come from the coaches, they came from within the playing group. We know some of what we did wasn’t anywhere near what we expect of ourselves and we have to address that.

“When you play the team who are top of the table like they are, you can’t afford to give them easy ins into the game because they will punish you. We did too much of that and they capitalised.

“The annoying thing from our perspective is when we got that momentum in the second half, it wasn’t like we flicked some magical switch, we just didn’t. What we did was the simple things over and over again - and we did them well. In the first half, we had ten seconds of doing things right, but then a sloppy or unforced errors would let them back into the game,

“That’s something we’ve talked about this week and, hopefully, it’s something we can put right at the weekend.”