By Whaley Shark
April 27 2013

 As  many of you have already pointed out, quite a few of our players, including a couple whom I personally rate highly, are moving on, and there are few replacements yet identified. What does this mean?

Well, I hope that it means a lot of business going on quietly behind the scenes, with a flurry of announcements to come over the next couple of weeks, but only time will tell. And what would I like to see?

I think, just in time, we found a way of playing which got us out of some pretty deep mire, and I think that was based around a forward pack that played together and didn’t bother too much with the Fancy Dan stuff. OK it didn’t have the power and organisation to terrify the Tigers’ eight but it saw off some decent Premiership forwards, not least Gloucester’s. That return to competitive forward play seemed to me to be associated with a three things- Dimes’ resumption of a coaching role, the arrival of Daniel Braid, and the return from injury of some of our less glamorous forwards, such as Andrei Ostrikov. Given that Dimes has said he will remain in a coaching role next season, that’s one ingredient and, given that most of our confirmed departures are forwards, I think the other is to get hold of a bunch of gnarly hard men, so that we aren’t so dependent on a few unsung heroes to do the hard graft. I don’t know enough to name names, but I’d be very happy to see a bunch of low profile, battle-hardened recruits in the forwards. Much as I can see the attraction of Richie Gray, who at times seemed to play as a lock/winger, I don’t think we had enough grunt to support a player like him, and I think he was unable to show what he was capable of in this year’s Sale side. So he moves on with my best wishes, as indeed do all our leavers.

And as for the backs, pretty alien territory for a former forward like me, well I quite like the options offered by a Cipriani/Macleod combo at 10. They’re very different in style, and I like both for very different things. So, probably, it’s horses for courses- Nick for a more controlled, limited game plan, perhaps when the forwards are more pressurised, and Danny for a more expansive, risk-taking one. Hopefully, we will have some stability in the back division, our developing youngsters will be more seasoned, and the players will be more attuned to each other by September, so we’ll see fewer lapses of sanity and less schoolboy silliness. 

Returning to the original question, given that we’ve been in a relegation dogfight for so much of the season, and have obviously been unstable off the field too, I wonder how much of a draw we’ll have been for potential incoming players? Not much, I suspect. It’s only in the last few weeks that things have really stabilised, so I’d hope people will start to feel confident about committing themselves to us, so the silence is perhaps less ominous and more predictable. I’d like to see a bunch of respectable signings now things are clearer- not high profile, high cost, big names, but decent Premiership players who’ll give us stability. That, I think would lay the foundations for a season of solid achievement- not putting 50 points on Tigers or Sarries away from home, but competing well, avoiding the relegation dogfight, and maybe sneaking into the top half of the table this time next year. That would do me.