Exeter Chiefs director of rugby Rob Baxter says his side’s European Challenge Cup quarter-final against Benetton in northern Italy will come too soon for the return of key players Len Ikitau and Ethan Roots.<\/p>\n
Chiefs withstood a second-half fightback from Munster to hold on for a 31-21 victory<\/a> at a blustery Sandy Park in Baxter’s first game since it was announced he had agreed a new “multi-year” deal<\/a> to continue his 17-year reign. <\/p>\n The win has set up a tie against Italian club Benetton, who won all four matches in the pool stage and edged out Cardiff<\/a> in an 11-try thriller in the round of 16.<\/p>\n Wingers Immanuel Feyi-Waboso and Paul Brown-Bampoe shone in Saturday’s victory against Munster and they will be on the plane for Sunday’s crunch clash.<\/p>\n But Australia international centre Ikitau, 27, who suffered a shoulder injury in December<\/a>, and England back row Roots, 28, who has been ruled out since a calf tear last month<\/a>, remain unavailable for selection.<\/p>\n “We came through the weekend with a clean bill of health,” Baxter told BBC Radio Devon.<\/p>\n “Obviously, a few bumps and bruises. We made an awful lot of tackles. We made double the tackles of Munster, which was a fantastic defensive effort in the second half, which ultimately won us the game.<\/p>\n “Len is getting closer by the day. He’s running around, he’s doing quite a bit. <\/p>\n “He was doing a little bit of contact on bags yesterday, which is always a good sign, and he’s kind of in the mix of being a week or so away.<\/p>\n “Ethan Roots is very close. He’s pretty much in full training. We’re getting close to starting to pad the squad out a bit – that in itself probably allows us that little bit more rotation than we’re available to at the moment. We’re getting there.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Exeter Chiefs director of rugby Rob Baxter says his side’s European Challenge Cup quarter-final against Benetton in northern…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":593979,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-593978","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-rugby","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-rugby","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593978","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=593978"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593978\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/593979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=593978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=593978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=593978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}