In the first home game of the Aviva Premiership Rugby season, Tigers trailed for 50 minutes up to the 70th-minute mark and claimed a bonus-point try in the last minute of a pulsating game against the newly-promoted Chiefs at Welford Road.
“They gave us one almighty scare,” admitted Cockerill after Tigers had sealed a 37-27 victory.
“You’ll talk about how poor we were, but a huge amount of credit goes to Exeter. They’re a good team and they will cause a lot of problems for a lot of teams. I didn’t know what to expect but I do know now and I think the rest of the Premiership does too.
“They are big guys, they are hard and physical with the ball and without it. They made it very tough for us.
“To come here and play like that and take nothing from the game must be pretty sickening. They deserved something.
“We’re pleased with the five points but hugely disappointed with the way we played. Some of that is down to Exeter’s good play and some is down to our inaccuracy.
“But give us some credit for staying in there and keeping going. Sometimes it is hard being the team everybody wants to beat. We’ve had a discussion about that in the dressing room after the game.”
Geordan Murphy’s 12th-minute try gave Tigers a 7-3 lead, but centre Phil Dollman scored twice for the Chiefs in an eight-minute period around the half-hour mark and Mark Foster scored his side’s third to make it 27-16 to the visitors with an hour played.
Then, though, Scott Hamilton and Dan Hipkiss provided finishing touches for Tigers and the forwards earned a penalty try in the last move of the match to claim the four-try bonus. Fly-half Jeremy Staunton was on target with all seven of his kicks at goal.
“We need to be better at a number of things and we need to be better physically,” added Cockerill.
“We conceded three tries this week and three last week, our defence was not good enough. We will fix that ourselves, as we always do.
“There was no point in panic. We knew we needed to string some phases together and then we could cause some problems.
“It has been a huge wake-up call for everybody today, but those five points will be massive at the end of the season.”
Tigers welcomed back Tom Croft for his first action of the season and his second-half performance earned the Aviva Premiership Rugby man-of-the-match award.
“Crofty is a world-class player,” said Cockerill. “I didn’t start him because he hasn’t played at all in pre-season, but we brought him on at half-time because we needed him.
“The quality of our bench kept us going and got us into in the game.”
Anthony Allen was an early casualty with an ankle injury and Tigers had to rejig the midfield before the game was 20 minutes old.
“He had a bit of a sore ankle before the game and just tweaked it and we took him off early,” said Cockerill. “Billy Twelvetrees came on, he’s a good player, and we only took him off at the end because we thought Manu Tuilagi might give us a bit more punch to go for that fourth try.”
