{"id":390544,"date":"2026-01-26T01:21:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-26T01:21:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/390544\/"},"modified":"2026-01-26T01:21:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-26T01:21:10","slug":"exeter-chiefs-face-anxious-wait-over-wallaby-tom-hooper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/390544\/","title":{"rendered":"Exeter Chiefs face anxious wait over Wallaby Tom Hooper"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Exeter Chiefs<\/a> are sweating on the results of a scan to find out the extent of the knee injury suffered by their Wallaby blindside flanker Tom Hooper<\/a> in Saturday\u2019s 8-3 defeat to Bristol<\/a> Bears at Sandy Park.<\/p>\n

Hooper, 24, has been outstanding in the 10 games he has played since arriving at Sandy Park from the Brumbies<\/a> in October, but was injured after only eight minutes when Manny Feyi-Waboso fell into him.<\/p>\n

There are now fears that he has suffered damage to his anterior cruciate ligament, which would mean a period of between nine and 12 months on the sidelines, depending on the severity of the injury.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe lose Tom Hooper early in the game after we make a mistake. Manny misses the catch and gets pushed over onto Tom. We lose one of our best five forwards, and we knock on.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s what I mean by our mistakes hurt us more than Bristol\u2019s mistakes hurt them. It\u2019s his knee, and we will know the level of it once he has had a scan,\u201d said Chiefs<\/a> boss Rob Baxter in his post-match media conference.<\/p>\n

Losing Hooper, who has been capped 22 times by Australia, would be a massive blow to the Chiefs, who have suffered three defeats in the last four in all competitions and are now eight points behind PREM leaders Northampton<\/a> Saints.<\/p>\n

Hooper, like Len Ikitau<\/a>, had sprinkled his stardust at the Chiefs and the stats since the outside centre was injured against Saracens<\/a> before Christmas tell an interesting story.<\/p>\n

In the five games Ikitau played, they won all five, scoring 176 points, but in the five games without him, they have only won two and scored 109 points.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Baxter said that Italian international scrum-half Steve Varney, who was recently sidelined with a rib injury, missed the game against the Bears with a groin injury.<\/p>\n

\u201cSteve tweaked a groin. He started to feel it early in the week, and it just didn\u2019t clear up in time,\u201d added the Chiefs director of rugby.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Exeter Chiefs are sweating on the results of a scan to find out the extent of the knee…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":390545,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[5903,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-390544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-rugby","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=390544"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390544\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/390545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=390544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=390544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=390544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}