Saracens face difficult ask to spike motivation levels ahead of Exeter Chiefs trip in quest to reach Premiership final
Saracens face a tricky trip to Sandy Park on their penultimate step towards winning the 'double-double'
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Your support makes all the difference.Two days on from one of their greatest wins in their history, Saracens must find a way to spike their motivation levels once again in order to back up last Saturday’s European Champions Cup triumph with progression to the Premiership final.
But that’s easier said than done, given they face the long trip to Sandy Park to take on Exeter Chiefs, the side who beat Sarries to a home semi-final on the last day of the regular season. There are many who believe that a Wasps vs Saracens final is destined to grace Twickenham in little under two weeks’ time, but the Chiefs will have a major say in whether the European champions the chance to defend their crown.
It is a repeat of last year’s Premiership final, where Saracens threatened to blow Exeter off the park in south-west London as they surged to a 23-3 lead before Exeter fought back to make a game of it. Exeter are also the only side in the English top flight that did not suffer defeat at Allianz Park this season after securing a 13-13 draw their back in January, so Saracens know better than most the dangers that they pose.
So when they run out in front of a partisan Chiefs crowd this Saturday afternoon, director of rugby Mark McCall wants to make sure that Saracens do themselves justice in reaching a fourth consecutive Premiership final in order to book their place against either Wasps or outsiders Leicester Tigers.
“The big thing we’ll say on Tuesday is: we’ve put a lot into the last nine months into the Premiership. Ignore this competition [Europe] for now,” McCall said. “A lot of players have worked really hard over the course of the year, we’re in a semi-final, we owe it to ourselves, not to anyone else, to give it everything we’ve got.
“Exeter are on fire at the moment, it’s a real tough place to go. Of course we are going to allow our players to enjoy the next couple of days, but we’ll meet up on Tuesday to try and prepare as we did last year for Leicester.”
If Saracens can pull off two more victories this season, they will celebrate an historic double-double, becoming the first English side to do so since the great Leicester Tigers side of 2001/02. But McCall is keen to play down any importance of the club building a legacy with this current crop of players, and insists he will leave the hype-building to those outside of the club in order to focus on the task at hand in beating Exeter.
“Genuinely, we don’t really care what anyone else thinks,” McCall added. “All those dynasty questions and legacy questions, they are for others to judge in due course. We don’t talk about those things at all. We talk about getting better, we talk about evolving as a rugby team over a long time.”
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