Pictures: Exeter Rugby Club/Pinnacle Photo Agency

Chiefs are busy preparing "to hit the season hard", says Hepher

Exeter Chiefs assistant coach Ali Hepher is expecting the Aviva Premiership to be even tougher when it returns to full-on action in early September.

Last season the Chiefs finished sixth in arguably their toughest top flight campaign to date – an outcome which ensured the Devon club would be competing amongst Europe’s elite in the Heineken Cup once more.

However, Hepher believes the 2013/14 season will see the standard rise even further and has issued a timely warning to his players of what to expect.

“It always cranks up a notch,” said Hepher. “If you stand still you fall behind in this league. It’s important we knock ourselves on, but we need to knock ourselves on by a bigger margin than our rivals.

“There is a lot of work going on at the minute and there will be a lot of hard work going on over the next three months ready to hit the season hard.”

The Chiefs report back for the start of pre-season next Wednesday (June 19), but Hepher insists plenty has been going on behind the scenes at Sandy Park to ensure the club hit the new season at full tilt.

“It doesn’t really take long to kick-start again,” added Hepher. “A lot of preparation work went on before the end of last season.

“We’re well prepared coming into pre-season, we’ve got a lot of work on our hands, we’ve got to get the group together very quickly and also kick our game on. It’s a big time for us to improve as a squad and hit the season running.”

In a strong conclusion to last season, the Chiefs lost just once in their final seven Premiership fixtures. The sole blemish was a narrow home defeat to eventual champions Leicester Tigers and Hepher wants his team to pick up from where they left off.

“The guys pushed on,” he said. “We always felt we were capable of doing that and it was a case of staying positive through some results that didn’t go our way, even though the performances were good.

“We knew that eventually, if we continued performing at a high level, the results would follow and they certainly did at the end of the season.

“We’re pleased with how we finished, but we’ve got a lot of hard work to do now in pre-season to get back up to that level and also knock ourselves on a stage. We need to do to hit the ground running.”

As well as a strong pre-season programme of training, the Chiefs will also line-up in three warm-up games against Scarlets (away, August 17), Bristol (home, August 24) and Glasgow Warriors (home, August 31).

For many Chiefs supporters, those three fixtures will offer them their first glance of the new-look Exeter squad, which to date has been bolstered by the recruitment of Cardiff Blues duo Tom James and Ceri Sweeney, Dave Lewis (Gloucester) and Fetu’u Vainikolo (Connacht).

Hepher says the make-up of the Chiefs squad for next term looks good and he is excited about working with the new arrivals.

“We’ve refined the squad a little bit and brought in some really good guys,” he said. “They’re going to have to fight against some quality guys already here, so it makes for good competition in the squad and that can only drive the performance levels.

“The guys start on a clean sheet and they can attack the pre-season and earn the right to put on the shirt come the start of the year, then performance will dictate. It’s pretty simple here – the guys who perform the best will get the shirts.”