For Northampton Saints and Exeter Chiefs, this Gallagher Prem season will end as it began. It feels a long while ago that the pair embarked on their domestic campaigns in the shadow of the Women’s World Cup final but, as they prepare to dance again on a grander stage, the opening round meeting between the pair at Franklin’s Gardens is worth reflecting upon. It feels, in a way, a fixture of a different time, occurring too early in the season for Northampton’s British and Irish Lions to play a part and before Exeter’s impactful Australian additions had even arrived in the country.
And yet, within the details, were clues and cues for the season that has followed. Northampton’s establishing of a 33-7 half-time lead came courtesy of a try from Tom Litchfield, launching his breakthrough campaign as the latest back off the production line; Exeter’s superb counter-offensive was inspired by Immanuel Feyi-Waboso, so influential when fitness has permitted a place on the park. There was a certain symmetry to how the Chiefs roared back to snatch a draw on the opening weekend and the second-half surge in the semi-final at the Rec that has set up their Twickenham trip. They, as in September and last week, begin as underdogs; Northampton will recognise from experience that this Chiefs team doesn’t know when it is beaten.
“Knowing some of these lads, they’ve got the confidence and belief to think they can do anything and that’s how I want them to feel,” Exeter boss Rob Baxter said this week. ”My job is to just get them ready enough and I say more than anything else, emotionally ready enough to put another 80 minutes together, because if they can roll up like that again, it’s going to be a hell of a day.”
12 months ago, when they had finished eighth and ninth in the table, the idea of a final between these two felt unlikely. It was easy to project a positive regression for Northampton after an abnormal, anomalous season in which they had prioritised a proper go in the Champions Cup over another title tilt in the Prem but it is to be commended how impressively they have restored domestic order nonetheless. The emergence of Litchfield, Edoardo Todaro, Archie McParland, Ed Prowse and others is testament to a coaching staff that marries off-pitch culture and on-field capers so superbly.
Such a swift turnaround for Exeter was rather harder to foresee. They were, in truth, a club that looked lost this time a year ago, mired in uncertainty and upheaval from top to bottom. Now, with new American owners on the way, a playing group of renewed purpose and the steadying hand of Baxter back firmly on the tiller, English rugby union’s modern success story appear upwardly mobile again. Having had their remarkable rise through the ranks translated to the stage earlier this season, with the excellent book Exe Men converted for a limited run in the autumn, another Prem title might just make a compelling third act to the Exeter story.
It would be a title hard earned as they attempt to become the first team to win the Prem from third place – a statistical oddity overdue a correction. Exeter have timed their run well, with those aforementioned Aussies Tom Hooper and Len Ikitau providing a sprinkle of international class in just the right places, complementing those around them. But a lesson of this Prem season has been that real value can be found beyond the big names: take Billy Searle at Leicester, perhaps the league’s most consistent fly half more than a decade in to a nomadic career. Exeter’s recruitment of Stephen Varney and Andrea Zambonin has proved just as shrewd.
Northampton prefer, generally, to grow their own. To reach a third final in three seasons shows that strategy is working even with Saints not spending up to the Prem salary cap, and being prepared to part with their captain, George Furbank, at the end of the season. Harlequins-bound Furbank will bid farewell with his boyhood club unwilling and unable to offer his desired contractual terms – with the highly-rated James Pater rapidly coming through to join George Henry and Todaro as alternative full-back options, there is confidence that he can be compensated for.
Not that it makes it any easier to part with a senior head in a tight-knit group. To see the Saints swaying on social media to the strains of Olivia Dean in the changing room after their semi-final was a revealing insight into a band of brothers. “It’s a special group,” Furbank explained to the BBC. “A lot of us will call each other best mates, and we spend probably too much time together, to be honest, off the pitch, but I think that is what’s so special about this group.
“We do spend a ridiculous amount of time together, and so when it comes on to the pitch, it does feel natural. There’s something about playing with a group of mates that makes you want to go that little bit further and run that little bit more and hit that little bit harder. I’ve loved my time here genuinely from minute one to my last game on Saturday. It’d be a pretty fairytale ending to my 10 years lifting a trophy.”
The return of Alex Mitchell, back on the bench ahead of schedule, further strengthens that English core; Exeter can answer with Feyi-Waboso, passed fit to feature despite a facial fracture. Soaring temperatures, which tend to accompany a great rugby day upon which the sun so often shines, will suit two sides built to play running rugby – but that each coach has loaded up with six forwards on the bench reflects where the final may be won. There is one thing, of course, that is certain to be different than on the opening day: there will be a winner.
