‘This will sting Bath’published at 17:28 BST
17:28 BST
FT: Bath 26-27 Exeter
Martin Haag
Former Bath lock and coach on BBC Radio Bristol
Exeter were the only team in it in the second half and that’s why you have to take your hat off to to their coaching staff – Rob Baxter and Dave Walder, in particular – with how they stayed in that game.
They do stay in games, they have a fantastic ethos and their DNA was probably missing last year. But this year they seemed to have got it back and it just shows that you can never write them off.
Overall, it was such a close game, Bath were great in the first half and not so great in the second half. Unbelievable.
It will sting Bath because we set such a high bar now. This is a third semi-final we’ve been in, in three years and this is actually a turn-up for the books because if you look at the stats, home semi-finals are normally won by the home team and very, very rarely are they turned over by the away team.
Exeter have done a job on Bath and they’ll be delighted. But from where we were four or five years ago to where we are now, we’re in a great place.
We’ve got a world-class team, world-class coaches, we’re in competing with Europe, we’re competing in semi-finals and we want to be in finals. That’s the expectation.
That’s the great thing about Bath: we’ve got that mentality back that we want to be in there.
Today will hurt – it will really hurt. One will look at it and go ‘it was one that got away’.