The boys down west who know how to win

THE way they see it down Exeter way, only one team is flying the flag for the region as the Premiership campaign heads for home.

- CHRIS HEWETT

And who might that be? Exeter, as it happens, on the grounds that their nearest top-flight neighbours – Bath, Bristol, Gloucester – are impostors from the Midlands masquerading as West Countrymen with their townie accents and their “cowpat chic” shooting jackets.

Geographically-based outbreaks of identity politics took root in domestic union many moons ago: “Come on Cornwall, shove it up the English” read a memorable banner on County Championship final day at Twickenham back in the 1980s. Nothing much has changed over the stretch of the professional era and the fact that Exeter, dismissed for so long as a local irrelevance by the Big Three to the immediate north, are the only ones to have actually nailed a Premiership title – a couple of the them, to be strictly accurate – bolsters their sense of authenticity.

Unfortunately for the peninsula as a whole, there is another fact in play: namely, that when it comes to Premiership success, only the miserably weak northern division has struggled as badly. It is even possible to argue that, despite their disadvantages in securing a significant foothold for top-flight union in areas of the country besotted with football and the rival rugby code, the North has out-performed the South West by producing two champion teams, as opposed to a single two-time winner.