ROB Baxter admitted Exeter Chiefs didn't deserve to beat Bristol yesterday after falling to a second successive defeat.

The Sandy Park outfit lost 25-16 in front of a record crowd of 7,405 against their promotion rivals.

Head coach Baxter said his side made too many mistakes to win a tight game against a top side.

But he felt there were enough positives to suggest the Chiefs will be a stronger side later on in the season when promotion will be up for grabs.

Exeter were 10-6 down at the break but gifted Bristol three tries in the second half to leave them too much to do.

They fought back late in the game with Nic Sestaret crossing but the visitors held on to take the lead in the Championship.

Baxter said: "Every good season is made up of special moments that you've got to draw on and come back to. I think the last 10 or 15 minutes could be one of those moments for us.

"We know we can play better than we played for large parts of the game.

"A lot of individuals stood up in that last 15 minutes and said 'we're here to be counted, let's make something of this game'.

"We were pushing at the end and if we'd sneaked over again it would have been an interesting end to the game.

"I would have said, on balance, we wouldn't have deserved to come back any stronger than we did at the end because you can't make some of the mistakes we made today and expect to come through a really tough game of rugby.

"We've got to lock down our error count and our poor decision-making, get that sorted and we'll be a better side next time we play."

After a great start to the season that saw the Chiefs win their first 13 league games they have gone slightly off the boil in the past month.

Baxter revealed that is partly because they have been doing a lot of work in the gym as well as the usual preparations in the training field.

That is the way the coaches planned the season to make sure the players are in top condition going into the play-offs at the end of the campaign.

"Our focus hasn't been 100 per cent on rugby for six weeks," said Baxter.

"We've worked very hard on some conditioning work and it was always going to take us a few weeks to bounce out of the end of that.

"I'm not making excuses, we should have performed better."

Baxter added: "Everyone will be saying, 'why didn't you play like that (in the last 15 minutes) for the whole game?'

"It's not quite that simple, rugby is a pressure game and for a large part of the game we kept the pressure on Bristol."