'Every Tuesday we look to embrace chaos, look to make them fail'

Chaos at training on Tuesdays has been the key ingredient in helping Sale to improve their on-field behaviour in this season’s Gallagher Premiership, according to director of rugby Alex Sanderson. The Sharks go into this Friday night’s match at home to London Irish knowing that a win will send them top of the table and they have every confidence of bagging that victory thanks to how they have been faring in recent weeks with the referees.

Sale had a bad habit of collecting too many cards last season while their penalty count of 295 conceded left them the eleventh worse team in the league with only Bath (302) and Northampton (318) having infringed more over the course of the 2021/22 Premiership campaign.

DoR Sanderson identified this penalty rate as a major work-on over the pre-season and the effort they have put into improving this area of their game has seen them improve on the penalties conceded ladder and also cut down on their number of cards shipped.

Just 51 penalties have been conceded in their four Premiership matches so far – leaving Sale fifth best in the now eleven-team league – and three of those outings have passed off card-free. Only their round two victory at Bath saw them numerically disadvantaged.

Nick Schonert was red-carded on nine minutes for head-on-head contact and they then had to cope with having just 13 players for the ten-minute spell when Ross Harrison was yellow-carded on 63 minutes.

Sanderson has welcomed this behavioural improvement with open arms. “We are working on it, we do work in it. Yellow cards have improved dramatically,” he told RugbyPass in the build-up to the visit of the Irish. “We were maybe eleventh or something for the number of yellow cards we received last season compared to the most the season before that in my first six months of tenure, so you can see how we have improved in that area.

“Yes, there is an increasing number of red and yellow cards (across the league) for obvious reasons with regards to contact to head, so it is something you have got to mitigate for in terms of your training methodology as well.

“We have been at disaster training camp for three days in Wiltshire, which I told you about at the back end of the pre-season. I spent some time with Andrew Strauss, who had adopted similar principles when he trained his team to win the World Cup and that super over – you don’t get any blogger black swan moment than that.

“And every Tuesday we look to embrace chaos, we put them under it, we make them fail every Tuesday and understand the calculated risks within that failure, so it is part of our process on a weekly basis and throughout the pre-season to be able to deal with these moments of adversity and come out the other side. That is what has tied us together. It is not by fluke.

“Togetherness is one thing, the scrambling, the change in plan as well, the adaptation of flexibility within all the chaos which that black swan moment causes is something we have trained for from week one in pre-season. There is thinking on our feet, how we can communicate, what is next, being able to shelve what has just happened and come up with a new plan and be on the same page.”

Sale’s two regular-season meetings last year with London Irish ended in high scoring draws. He isn’t a fan of sharing the spoils but would prefer that rather than adopting a tie-breaker as happens in some other sports when a match is tied. “I’m not a fan of them, but it is an element of the game that should be left in.”