Sale DoR Alex Sanderson opens up on the 'extremely stressful' part of the job

Sale Sharks boss Alex Sanderson spent most of last season trying to recruit a squad to compete with the best in the Gallagher PREM and then the last six months trying to keep it together beyond next summer.

Sanderson went from the business of recruiting Joe Marchant, Nicky Smith, Tomas Francis, Alex Lozowski, Ponepati Loganimasi, Elia Canakaivata, Christ Tshiunza, Courtney Lawes and Xavier Roe to persuading a host of current stars to stay.

The Curry twins, Ben and Tom, and Bevan Rodd and Luke Cowan-Dickie are among the big names out of contract at the end of the season, while Tshiunza and Lawes signed one-year contracts when they joined the club in the summer.

And Sanderson says that as soon as the ink was dry on the new recruits’ contracts, they had to open talks with those who were free to speak to rival clubs at the start of July.

“After the signing of all our new recruits, the next job was to retain all our existing core group. So we’ve been plugging away since the Six Nations on that front, and it’s all moving very positively, but it was extremely stressful,” he said.

“In the Six Nations, I’ve been feeling like you’ve completed one task and then you’ve just got to go, ‘right, now these guys come onto the open market in July’.

“That was the stressful bit, having to convince them, to a degree, but to remind them that this is the best place for them in terms of their development, because they’re obviously very career-minded.

“It’s not the best part of the job, it’s a bit of a hamster wheel.

“I found it stressful having those conversations because of the relationships I’ve built with them. Do I have to lean into that again? But it’s part and parcel of the job.”