Cullen knows what makes his players tick: Baxter

FARMING life formed the lives of Leo Cullen and Rob Baxter, but rugby would soon come to define them.

In their younger days, they would spend much of the time on their respective family farms but, when they followed their fathers and mothers around, they had an oval ball permanently lodged beneath their oxters.

Their background is shared and so too much of their rugby development; Leinster’s man main Cullen, though, managed to scale playing heights denied his counterpart at Exeter.

“Obviously Leo played at a higher level than I did,” smiles Baxter, when we ask him to speak about his kindred rugby spirit.

“I’ll be honest, we don’t really know each other, or we haven’t spent any time with each other, other than shaking hands before and after games and that brief chat you have around a game.”

But neither man ever deviated from the ambition coursing through them; they are deep thinkers of the game and, although Exeter have shrugged off their tag as a limited side, they have expanded their horizons to embrace all the beauty their sport can provide, as well as being successful with it.

Baxter may not know Cullen personally, but his recognition of the professional is intensely intimate.

“As I say, I don’t really know Leo, but if you are thinking of the similarities around being embedded at one club, potentially what you get to know is, over the period you are at a club as a player, you probably start to get what makes players tick. Especially if you captain the side and are a leader in the team.

“Because then you start to take on the responsibility of more than just what you need to do tactically in a game, you start to take on some of that emotional kind of leadership about what drives players and what creates good performances.

“And that becomes almost as important as anything else. It’s not always just the knowledge of rugby, it’s also a knowledge of people.

“You just grow an understanding of what makes people tick in that environment, whether it be internally, or people that will fit in at the club from outside, whatever it might be.”