Almost two years ago to the day, Rob Baxter fired the gun on a rivalry that had been simmering within English rugby for much of the decade to ignite into something far more explosive.
Baxter’s Exeter Chiefs, the team he had taken from plucky underdogs to the model operation within the salary cap based largely around local talent in the south west, had faced and lost out to Saracens on each occasion when they both reached the Premiership final in 2016, 2018 and 2019.
Saracens too had built their success on a spine of homegrown English talent, but just 72 hours after England had lost the Rugby World Cup final to South Africa, it was revealed that the cost of keeping that golden generation on top of their bank of overseas superstars had resulted in a breach of the salary cap through controversial image rights agreements.
Every Premiership club was entitled to have grievances but in the immediate aftermath of the scandal and Saracens’ eventual relegation to the Championship for the 2020/21 season, it was remarks made by Baxter in December 2019 that showed just how much suspicion the Devon side had been harbouring about their rivals.
Referring to Saracens’ results over the three seasons they had been censured for, Baxter said: “They’re just not real. I look at the other 10 Premiership clubs but there is one club whose results I don’t set any store by now because we don’t know if there is any honesty behind them. There certainly hasn’t been for three years.
“How Saracens play now is the least important thing for me in the Premiership. What I used to do is watch them in order to learn from it, learn how to try to beat them. Now the big lesson on how you achieve what Saracens have achieved is to be outside the rules that we are all adhering to.”
This claim from Baxter that Saracens’ success “wasn’t real” soon became known as “fake” among the media and fans of other clubs. The north Londoners’ success also included European crowns in 2016, 2017 and 2019 and this of course led to Eddie Jones’ England side being built around a core of Saracens players that included Owen Farrell – the current club captain and the man who led England to that World Cup final – as well as Maro Itoje, Billy and Mako Vunipola, Jamie George and later Elliot Daly, who joined the side from boyhood club Wasps in 2019.
The two sides have not faced each other at Sandy Park in the top flight since Dec 29, 2019 when Exeter sealed a 14-7 victory, and this Saturday finally brings a long-awaited repeat of that fixture. Two years ago a brief fight at the start of the match brought the crowd to life, but when Jack Nowell hugged his opponent Daly at the end, there were almost sighs of disappointment from the home fans, such was the bitterness they felt towards Saracens.
There was always a sense from the Exeter faithful that despite their own successes, which culminated in the 2017 Premiership final when they beat Wasps in extra-time, plus the 2020 Premiership and European double, that a number of their stars were overlooked by Jones in favour of Saracens players, thus breeding further contempt.
Possibly, the most high-profile snub against an Exeter player was that of Sam Simmonds, who until this autumn had been left out of England squads repeatedly once Billy Vunipola returned from injury. But the ill-feeling over international selections went much further than that, with many Exeter fans firmly in the belief that Joe, younger brother of Sam and who captained his side to the 2020 double, is a better fly-half than Farrell, and that Luke Cowan-Dickie is a better option at hooker than long-term incumbent George.
