FOLLOWING ON from a stop-start beginning to their campaign, the largely positive first hour against Munster would have been forgotten by the vast majority of the 18,000 capacity crowd as they headed into Saturday night. But for all their concerns, they aren’t being shared by at least one member of the home team.

“No, I am not worried about our form,” maintained Fergus McFadden. “We will look at our performances and what we need to address during the week. Small things. We put some good phases together here but we just weren’t clinical enough in their red zone and turn that into scores. If we can do that next week we could be on our way to a lot better performance.”

It had been a particularly tough day at the office in getting beyond three or four phases “We weren’t really effective enough with the men that we were putting into the ruck,” admitted McFadden. “The times when we did have numbers we would go off our feet and that gave them the opportunity to get through. That’s why Eoin Reddan was getting dragged in a lot and it was slowing our ball right down so it was lack of efficiency from us at the ruck.”

While it was critical to win, he also conceded: “They lost that today if we are gonna be honest. They aren’t just turning up this year in their first Heineken Cup. They are definitely going to get a couple of wins. It is a tough group and next week is going to be another huge challenge against a really good Scarlets team. We didn’t even get a try today so looking towards next week the four points is a priority but Clermont have a bit of a head start now with five from their first game.”

Exeter captain Tom Hayes was Man of the Match in his first game back in Ireland since his Shannon days eight years ago. “We were never out of it by any stretch of the imagination and we always felt there was something there for us to go for,” he said. “We always felt that the pressure was all on them. A try was going to put us in the lead and who was the pressure going to be on then?”