Baxter led Exeter to promotion to the top flight in 2010 – the club are the last side to be promoted from the second tier and establish themselves in the top flight.<\/p>\n
But Baxter says he also feels clubs must have the right infrastructure if they are to join the top flight.<\/p>\n
Exeter spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on Sandy Park in the run-up to their two-legged play-off final win over Bristol in order to ensure the club would be allowed to gain promotion. <\/p>\n
Only one non-Premiership shareholder club – London Welsh – has gained promotion since Exeter, moving their home games to Oxford United’s Kassam Stadium in order to be able to host a minimum of 10,000 spectators.<\/p>\n
Ealing and Jersey Reds have won the last four Championship titles, but neither side had a ground capable of hosting enough fans and were not promoted.<\/p>\n
“I can’t argue against the meritocracy-based part of it, but at the same time I think it’s important people understand the rules of getting basic things like a 10,000 stadium,” he said.<\/p>\n
“These aren’t new rules, it’s not like anybody in the Championship has just had these dropped on them now, they’ve been there for years and years.<\/p>\n
“If we want to take Ealing as a perfect example, they’ve known for a long time that to get promoted they would need to get a promotion-worthy team and a facility that can have 10,000 people.<\/p>\n
“That’s not been dropped on them in the last two years, it doesn’t get dropped on them six months before promotion does it? That’s my caveat to it all.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Baxter led Exeter to promotion to the top flight in 2010 – the club are the last side…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":518305,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85],"class_list":["post-518304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-rugby","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=518304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518304\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/518305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=518304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=518304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=518304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}