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Sale Sharks Boss Alex Sanderson spent much 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 recruiting Joe Marchant, Nicky Smith, Tomas Francis, Alex Lozowski, Ponepati Loganimasi, Elia Canakaivato, Christ Tshiunza, Courtney Lawes and Xavier Roe to convincing a number 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 deals when they joined the club in the summer.
And Sanderson says that as soon as the paint was dry on the new recruits’ contracts, they had to start talks with those who were free to talk to rival clubs in early July.
“After signing all our new recruits, the next job was to retain all the existing core group. So we cut ourselves off from Six Nations on that front, and everything is moving very positively, but it was extremely stressful,” he said.
“In the Six Nations, I felt like you’ve done one task and then you’ve just got to go, ‘yeah, now these guys are coming on the open market in July’.
“That was the stressful part, I had to convince them, to some extent, but remind them that this is the best place for them in terms of their development, because they are obviously very career oriented.
“It’s not the best part of the job, it’s a bit of a hamster wheel.
“It was stressful to have those conversations because of the relationships I built with them. Do I have to rely on that again? But it’s part of the job.”