Sale explain their Tuesday meeting with free agent Vincent Koch

Sale have reacted to speculation they are in the market to sign Springboks tighthead Vincent Koch, Sharks director of rugby Alex Sanderson admitting that he met the out-of-work Wasps player for a cup of tea on Tuesday. However, the front-rower will not be joining the Manchester club anytime soon, while rumours that Burger Odendaal, another player who is a free agent after being made redundant by Wasps, will also not be switching to the AJ Bell.

Sanderson was quite candid in explaining the rendezvous that took place at Sale with Koch, the 2019 World Cup winner who was spotted in Paris last Saturday attending a match involving Stade Francais, the Top 14 club that is chasing his signature.

Tongues were wagging when Koch pitched up in Manchester on Tuesday, catching up with Sanderson, his old assistant coach from his time at Saracens, the London club he exited in the summer after six seasons to hook up with Wasps.

However, despite Wasps having made 167 players and staff redundant including Koch, Sanderson insisted that the much-admired Springboks forward will not be signing for Sale as he is too expensive for them in a climate where wriggle room within the reduced salary cap is minuscule.

“He was picking up a watch from DMR [jewellers David M Robinson] yesterday from Altrincham, who are one of our shirt sponsors, so we thought it would be good to have a cup of tea with him,” outlined Sanderson at his Wednesday evening media briefing ahead of Sunday’s Sale match at Saracens.

“He is good mates with the du Preezs and Jono Ross and that is about the lot of it. Honestly, that’s it. It was just catching up with an old friend – which he is – and he was catching up with some old friends here. I think you will probably find down the line he will go for vast amounts of money to a club that can pay him. Vast amounts of money. I doubt it very, very much that he will come to Sale Sharks. Unfortunately, we can’t afford him.”

Explaining where Sale currently are with their recruitment in general, Sanderson continued: “Like most clubs who have got some injury dispensations and because there is a load of good players coming onto the market, both young players, who you don’t have to pay the academy dispensation to, and older players, all of whom we can’t fit into our cap through injury dispensation.

“But all of them we have spoken to and met with were to varying degrees of interest because you have to, it’s part of your job. You wouldn’t be fulfilling all your responsibilities if you weren’t to keep continually looking to improve your gene pool.

“To be consistent with our retention and recruitment policy we only want to employ people who want to be here and are able to be here for the long term, but there are some caveats to that. The short-term contracts for players allow us the time to bring some of those young players through and injuries for just when you need numbers.

“The only reason why we would look to sign people on short-term contracts are for those two things: a maturation time for the younger lads to come through and/or we just need numbers to fill the requirements. Otherwise, long-term we want people to be here to build something over time.

“It has proven to be more difficult than I thought it would be… we have gone to great lengths to do our due diligence to make sure for them and for us it is the right decision moving forward. Just because there are good players on the market doesn’t mean you should automatically sign them up in some kind of feeding frenzy.”

Speaking about meeting with ex-Wasps centre Odendaal, Sanderson said he was another player who wouldn’t be joining Sale: “No. We talked to him, he is a great player. We talked to him because we are relatively light in the centres but injury dispensation only stretches as far as the injury player’s salary and ability, a combination of both. So he didn’t enter a comparable in either of those two categories.”