It is Wednesday morning at Sale Sharks’ Carrington training base and Alex Sanderson, the director of rugby, steps out of his car in full fancy dress.
Ahead is a big day of preparation, with Sale’s second-versus-third match away to Harlequins on the horizon, in a bumper block of fixtures in which they face Toulouse, Ulster and Bath before the Six Nations.
The club is building something special, and there is some hard work behind that progress, but everyone needs a slice of fun. Sanderson has been ordered to come in today as a pimp because he turned up a little late to a meeting last week.
Upstairs in the gym he is asked to perform a short dance as Dr Dre blasts out over the speakers. This is part of “Shark Time” — a session held by the Sale squad on Wednesdays to assess whether they are living by the values they set out at the start of the season.
If you slip up — by not bringing a notebook to meetings, turning up late, failing to clean up — Sam Hill, the centre, will ask you to roll a die for your punishment. The players hate the one where they have to host a question-and-answer session on their personal Instagram accounts.
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“It’s nice they held me accountable,” Sanderson says, before breaking into a laugh. “Although we’ve had to change some of them [the punishments] as some of them weren’t PC enough for the modern era, like naked dancing . . .”
Next week will mark two years since Sanderson’s appointment — his first job leading a club. Having taken the Sharks to third in the Gallagher Premiership in his first few months in charge in 2021, his team dropped to sixth last season. But they are coming again, and look in their best shape since they won the title in 2006.
Sanderson has built a gritty, grafting side, with clever backs, and a togetherness blending Northern soul with Afrikaaners, and unsung heroes all over the pitch.
The hip-hop sideshow to start the morning embarrasses him but he adores what it represents. At the start of the season Sanderson asked all 45 of his players to write a short paragraph about who they wanted to be — as individuals and a group. He then used a copywriting company to distil the most-used phrases into seven or eight soundbites.
Before the Champions Cup match against Ulster in December — which they won 39-0 — the squad settled on the one they thought best represented their vision for the team: “brotherhood”. Now, two posters put up in the gym spell out the mantra: “a brotherhood of sharks”, with the main tenet “doing anything for the person by your side with ego pushed aside”. That includes the boss.
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“That’s pivotal, as it flows into what is really important about ‘team’ — no one is bigger than the team,” Sanderson says.
The 43-year-old is a student of motivation and leadership. He followed the advice of Sir Andrew Strauss and reads up on Prussian war strategy, is fascinated by the neurology of stress, and has installed a “mind-gym” to focus on mental health, better sleep, breathing techniques and nutrition.
Jamie Langley, the former Bradford Bulls rugby league player, runs elements of that — including the breathing exercises that the players complete each morning. In the gym he tells the players to lie on their backs, feet on the floor and knees bent. Via his phone Langley plays a metronome sound that clicks out through the speakers and tells the team to time their inhalation and exhalations with the one-second beat.
That lasts three minutes, before the forwards wrestle and perform one-legged jumps to hone their agility and strength, and the backs step over hurdles. By 10.30am they are all out on the pitch, passing balls of varying shapes to work on their hand-eye coordination, and grappling, before full team training.
Sanderson enjoys using visual and musical cues to theme weeks around his team’s opposition. When Sale thrashed Scarlets 57-14 in the Champions Cup last-16 in 2021, they had been inspired by Sanderson’s messaging about “slaying a dragon”. Over time, though, he has cut down on this “fluff”, as he calls it, like the award of helmets that now sit in the gym. “They are relics from yesteryear,” he says. “It’s always good to remind you what didn’t work.”
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One is a Viking Berserker helmet, and was given to the player who excelled physically in a match. The awarded player each week would wear the helmet then was entered into a draw to go to an all-you-can-eat restaurant at the end of the year.
“This group want to get on with things, want shorter meetings, a little bit less fluff, more direction,” Sanderson says. “It wasn’t really transferring — if you do it every week, it becomes a sideshow.”
The players are responding to Sanderson. Rob du Preez, the fly half, says: “There is a renewed energy to the place, and he’s taken us to the next level. The belief is really strong in this group.” Sale are clicking this season. With bonds built on a pre-season trip to Galway, and a more diverse game plan that flits between kicking, running and passing, adapted with strong collaboration between Du Preez, the head coach Paul Deacon and fresh input from the new recruit George Ford, who has been injured all season but told his backs to put the forwards in spaces, not at faces.
They won seven of their first eight matches of the season until a 29-13 defeat by Harlequins in October — where Sanderson felt that Sale were “too enamoured with themselves”. Four wins from five followed.
December defeats by Toulouse (45-19, where Sale chased a lost cause and were hammered) and Newcastle (20-14, which deeply annoyed Sanderson) were righted with a 40-5 smashing of Leicester Tigers in front of 9,491 fans at the AJ Bell on December 30. It was their second biggest crowd there in the ten years since they moved in.
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“Real change doesn’t come quickly,” Sanderson says. “I’m happy the lads are getting recognition for their efforts, and the performances are telling now, but that insinuates we weren’t working hard, didn’t have the right values, or weren’t prioritising the right things at the start and that’s not the case. It’s now coming to fruition. We’ve been doing this for a while.”
So what have they been doing? Becoming tighter as a unit is one major aspect. The “lockdown bar” is an important social hub, where Manu Tuilagi can be found making lattes, and players play pool or darts.
To find the other area for socialising, turn left out of the gym, and follow the music — that’s where each morning you will find the kit man, Pete Allen. He is a stalwart of the club since he pottered along to Heywood Road in November 2000 for Jason Robinson’s debut against Coventry. Sale needed a fire safety certificate, and Allen — a fireman — went down, stood at the players’ entrance, and loved it.
Soon he helped kit men Alan and Robbie load the van, and then coach Philippe Saint-André asked him to go to London Irish one week with them, and he never left, joining full-time under Steve Diamond when he retired from the fire service seven years ago. “It doesn’t seem as pressurised as it has done previously, not too up, not too down,” Allen says. “Everyone’s got a voice, is heard, is listened to, encouraged to give their opinion. It’s a safe environment.”
His kit room — adorned with shirts from opponents over the years, and complete with a coffee machine — is the social hub at Carrington. Each morning he plays 40 minutes of a specific genre of music. Today it’s Nineties RnB, so Craig David blares out, but come again and you could hear opera, country and western or drum and bass. “Some of it, after 30 seconds I know it’s not for me, but you’re committed,” Allen says with a smile. Before and after training, players drag chairs in to sit with him and chat.
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Allen is from Saddleworth, near Oldham, where Ford is too, and loves the mix between English and South Africans here. Those latter lads always switch from Afrikaans to English around him.
“It’s not about South Africans and English, it’s not cliquey, which is part of the brotherhood we speak about,” Du Preez, whose brothers Jean-Luc and Dan play here, says.
One phrase plastered on the walls at Carrington is a key marketing pledge across the whole club. Sale want to be the “fabric of the north”. “This is much bigger than rugby,” Sid Sutton, the chief executive, says.
The club’s mission is to establish a thriving, sustainable sporting business in the North West against the odds. With Manchester United and City up the road, Everton and Liverpool 30 miles away, and rugby league giants Wigan Warriors and St Helens closer than that, there often are not enough sporting supporters to go around. “Fill the stadium, have fun” is the club’s goal — but consistently attracting thousands to the AJ Bell is a challenge.
Next week, for example, Toulouse are coming and tickets are half-price. £20 to watch Antoine Dupont? It’s the deal of the year, but, as their 1pm kick-off comes half an hour after the start of football’s Manchester derby, there’s a lot of competition.
In November Sale’s Premiership match against Bristol Bears was moved three times — from Friday night, to Sunday afternoon, then to Saturday — for television. No wonder only 3,900 turned up.
Losing home matches against Wasps and Worcester Warriors meant Sale, like others, missed out on six-figures of revenue. Every margin matters up here, which is why Sutton is pushing for change. “Why don’t we have our fixtures set for the whole season?” he asks. “Could we do that differently to attract an audience and give us time to plan for a Friday night game in ten weeks – market it properly?”
He wants to see themed weekends, pushed centrally by the league, to align marketing strategies across the country’s struggling clubs. He wants the rugby to “almost be incidental” to match-day experiences; so funfairs for children, great food, drinks, referee microphones linked up to the Tannoy and an app to download on smart devices that can help explain simply the laws, enhancing everything. “We’ve got to be innovative, brave and creative,” he says.
Sale have no operational control of match days at the AJ Bell. The club are the main tenants of the ground they moved to in 2012, but Salford City council and a private land-owning company own half each. It means that Sale take 10-15 per cent of revenue made on their match days. No cash from food, drink or anything other than their ticket sales. A move to a Crossford Bridge site was blocked in 2020 by the council, and their plan to buy the AJ Bell with Salford City FC was rejected last month.
So, Sale are financially vulnerable. Sutton is trying to change that, negotiating a fully operational lease for the stadium so money from selling burgers to naming rights goes to them. “It’s critical,” he says. “We want to be a success here.”
It could be easy for Sanderson to be subsumed in all this — the fight for bums on seats — but his bosses allow him to get on with winning. “What is in my sphere of control that can bring people to the ground? It’s winning,” he says. “I have a better influence over that than persuading 2,000 people to come to the ground.”
Sanderson’s contract runs out in 2024, although with his recruitment syndicate — alongside Deacon, the co-owner Simon Orange, the rugby manager Paul Smith and the academy head Gareth Harris — he has planned player ins and outs until the 2024-25 season.
His week starts with a “calm waters” meeting on long-term strategy, by Wednesday he lets the coaches coach, but sets the intent of the week with players in mini-meetings, and come Friday the messages and game-plan triggers have been “thin-sliced”.
Sanderson has to be “omnipresent” throughout the week, he says, but does not want to be too important here, or everything ebbs and flows on his moods. And while winning — like Saturday against Harlequins — matters enormously, there is far more to Sale Sharks than that. There is a legacy to build here.
