Exeter Chiefs boss Rob Baxter hopes to bring fans back after low Sandy Park crowd

Exeter Chiefs director of rugby Rob Baxter says he will do what he can to create a side that can bring crowds back to Sandy Park.

The club closed their North Terrace for the first time for a league fixture in Sunday’s 34-28 win over Newcastle.

A crowd of just 7,071 attended the game at the 15,600-capacity home of last season’s beaten Prem finalists, despite the club cutting ticket prices earlier this month. , external

It led to an at times eerily quiet atmosphere at a ground that is normally noisy, especially for a league game.

The attendance lower than the 8,682 present for Exeter’s first home league game of the season against Gloucester last month – their first competitive game since being beaten by Northampton at Twickenham in June.

“The job I have to do to help build the crowd is to make sure the team perform well and win games of rugby,” Baxter told BBC Sport.

“Today we probably didn’t perform quite well enough, but having said that it did mean there was a game that had jeopardy in it right until the final whistle, so anybody here supporting it should have had a great entertaining day.

“They may have looked and gone ‘oh, I want it to be comfortable’, but actually they’ve stayed until the last second because the game was still in the balance, so we’ve ticked that box.

“When you have a fairly poor crowd there are things off the field that you have to address and look at as well.

“They are ongoing and I know a lot of people looking into those things.”