Free-flowing Harlequins dent Exeter playoff hopes with comeback win

Another Prem match, another comeback win. So common are they these days that it hardly needs mentioning that this one had Harlequins overturning the 17-point deficit by which they trailed after little more than half an hour, only to score 34 unanswered points in the next 50 minutes of rugby.

Their interest in the playoffs ended some months ago, such has been their form this season, but their hopes of European rugby have been helped no end by this romp at the big stadium across the road.

Exeter are still in contention for those playoffs, but if you were to tell them after that first half-hour they would be coming away with only the try bonus point they had just secured, they might not have believed you.

After their vital win over champions Bath the previous Sunday, the legs of their heavy forwards started to look weary, as the six-day turnaround started to tell in the wide-open spaces of HQ. Exeter remain in fourth, but they could have put themselves all but out of reach of the chasing pack had they not fallen away.

Boris Wenger was the unlikely figure to apply the icing on the Harlequins cake, intercepting a forced pass as Exeter tried to run the ball out from their 22 with the clock red, and milking the stadium’s euphoria as he ran to the posts for their sixth try.

Will Evans, another replacement, had just put the game to bed, when he finished out wide after Alex Dombrandt and Chandler Cunningham-South, Quins’ excellent performers in the back row, had scattered the Exeter defence with five minutes to go. All that after a rare kicked penalty by Marcus Smith had put the hosts in front for the first time with only 10 minutes to go.

Quite the turnaround then, but if comeback wins are de rigueur these days, there was something of an edge missing throughout, more jolly day out than intense crucible. The visitors were the first to capitalise on the looseness. They had a bonus point shortly after the half-hour mark, when Len Ikitau picked a killer line which took him through Jamie Benson and over the whitewash.

Benson was playing out of position at full-back, and the fly-half had a torrid time with the heavy-duty runners coming at him. Paul Brown-Bampoe also trampled over him on the way to Stephen Varney’s try, Exeter’s second, in the 10th minute.

Not that he was alone in missing tackles. Neither side’s defence was great, the half-full stadium, if that, and chill breeze lending proceedings a half-throttle feel. Not that the occasion lacked its moments, those two tries probably the pick of the first half, but this strangely uncompetitive season has meant a lot of these games as the sharp end approaches are lacking a certain bite.