Exeter vs Ospreys report: Rob Baxter amazed as Chiefs upset odds to grab place among elite

Taking the arithmetical brainache out of the final round of the European Champions Cup pool stage would be like removing the Book of Genesis from the Bible – and we couldn’t do that, could we?

In time-honoured fashion, the group phase ended yesterday with the kind of number-crunching agony that might have left Stephen Hawking screaming in a darkened room.

The bottom line? A barely feasible quarter-final place for Exeter. To say this came as a surprise to the Devonians’ rugby director Rob Baxter would be a masterpiece of understatement.

“I haven’t prepared anything, so I don’t know what to say,” he admitted, a man of the West Country soil sounding like a surprise winner at the Oscars. “We got ourselves ready for this game simply by talking about ourselves and the kind of character we wanted to show, because qualification as pool winners was so unlikely. I’m now finding it a bit hard to express my feelings.”

With a tight game between Clermont Auvergne and Bordeaux-Begles unfolding simultaneously in central France, the ever-honest Baxter was not the only person at Sandy Park without the foggiest idea of what the hell and why at the end of the game. In fact, it took the tournament organisers well over an hour to distribute a six-paragraph explanatory note confirming the facts of a very complicated matter.

But it was not quite so long before some bright spark did the necessary with his calculator and revealed all to Baxter: his men had sneaked home on points difference, partly because James Short and Thomas Waldrom scored tries for the Premiership club late in the day and partly because Clermont spurned an easy penalty opportunity at the last knockings – a shot that would, according to the mathematicians, have sent them through at Exeter’s expense.

The widespread assumption at kick-off time was that Ospreys, by some distance the most successful of the four Welsh regional sides, would put the squeeze on opponents knocked so far sideways by injury – Henry Slade, Sam Hill, Luke Cowan-Dickie, Mitch Lees and Dave Ewers were all off-limits – that they could barely stand up. But Ospreys were so poor in so many respects, from re-start routines and exit strategies to first-up tackling and all-round discipline, that they looked a beaten side as early as the 51st minute, when the strong-running Short ran through Sam Davies and kept Justin Tipuric at bay to bag the first of his two tries.

Baxter was well pleased with his wing’s contribution and with good reason: a journeyman Premiership performer with stints at Saracens and London Irish behind him, Short’s form since heading out of the home counties and into the deep south-west has been one of the features of Exeter’s outstanding season to date.

There again, it is difficult to find a part of their game that is not in good working order. In the early stages here, they inflicted some proper set-piece pain on an Ospreys pack featuring three tight forwards certain to play a significant part for Wales in the forthcoming Six Nations campaign.

As for the back-row trio of Kai Horstmann, Don Armand and the free-scoring heavyweight Waldrom, suffice to say they gave Tipuric and company a hurry-up. Not that Sam Underhill, the much discussed Ospreys flanker who may soon be the talk of the town in the England back row, was in any way outclassed.

Some of his tackling was eye-wateringly savage – indeed, he did himself a mischief with a trademark hit on Armand just shy of the hour mark and left the field with his shoulder drooping in a southerly direction – and he had some pace about him too. Tipuric, a Lions Test breakaway no less, is one of the sport’s greyhounds, yet Ospreys were happy to run the teenaged newcomer off the back of the line-out.

Horstmann’s close-range try on five minutes, following Waldrom’s tap-and-go stampede, set things in motion for the West Countrymen and while the Ospreys wing Hanno Dirksen responded in next to no time, Waldrom was at it again on 10 minutes, this time bagging the points for himself. That score set the tone. For all the huffing and puffing of Alun Wyn Jones, Dan Biggar and company, the Welshmen never truly looked like ending Exeter’s year-long unbeaten home record.

So it is that five English teams will feature in the knockout stage – the best Premiership performance in the history of Europe’s elite competition. Equally striking is the demise of the Celtic contingent: for the first time, the quarter-finals will be an exclusively Anglo-French affair. Quite what that means for the geographical breadth and variety of top-level club rugby in the northern hemisphere, with the gap between rich and poor nations growing by the week, does not bear thinking about, but Baxter, perhaps more than anyone, could be forgiven for sidestepping the issue.

“We know all about the rights and wrongs of the salary cap – this is the first season we’ve had full funding for playing in the Premiership,” he said. “We’re spending more money now, but I think we’ve done what we’ve done in the right way. That being the case, this is quite an emotional moment for us, because these occasions are precious in a sportsman’s career. Days like this can be gone in the blink of an eye.”

You could see his point, but Exeter are not the disappearing types. The only way they are going right now is up.

Exeter: Tries Waldrom 2, Short 2, Horstmann. Conversions Steenson 3, Hooley.

Ospreys: Tries Dirksen, penalty try. Conversions Biggar 2 Penalty Biggar.

Exeter P Dollman; O Woodburn, M Campagnaro (M Bodilly 61), I Whitten, J Short; G Steenson (W Hooley 68), D Lewis (H Thomas 61); A Hepburn (B Moon 58), J Yeandle (capt, E Taione 31-37 and70), A Brown (H Williams 61), J Hill, G Parling (O Atkins 31), K Horstmann (T Johnson 74), D Armand, T Waldrom.

Ospreys D Evans (S Parry 49-58); H Dirksen (S Davies 21), J Spratt (O Watkin 66), J Matavesi, E Walker; D Biggar, B Leonard (T Habberfield 66); P James (N Smith 57), S Baldwin (Parry 68), D Arhip (A Jarvis 53), L Ashley (R Thornton 28), A W Jones (capt, Thornton 20-23), S Underhill (D Baker 61), J Tipuric, J King.

Referee J Garces (France).