The canny 'saw your head drop' input George Ford is having at Sale

New signing George Ford is still a number of months away from making his Sale debut but Alex Sanderson has hailed the influence that the England out-half has still managed to wield on the Sharks squad since his arrival. Ford’s stellar return to form last season - which included an England Guinness Six Nations recall - came unstuck when injured just 24 minutes into the Gallagher Premiership final with Leicester at Twickenham.

The ruptured achilles was described by Sale in July as a six-to-nine-month injury where the best-case scenario was that Ford that would be in contention to make his club debut when Leicester - of all teams - visit Salford for a round 14 Premiership match at the end of December.

That has left the rehabbing Ford with plenty of time on his hands and he has been unselfish in using this to assimilate himself into his new club. Along with fellow new signings Jonny Hill and Tom O’Flaherty, they began by willingly sharing their thoughts with Sale from the perspective of the other clubs they have been at.

This communication has since filtered down into helping younger players at the club to prosper, the director of rugby Sanderson explaining how Ford was recently generous with his knowledge in helping the soon-to-be 23-year-old rookie out-half Kieran Wilkinson in his development after two Premiership Rugby Cup starts last month.

“George, Jonny and Tom wanted to give us their observations from the different organisations they have been in. They were reaching out with things which we implemented in a few ways,” said the DoR before going on to talk specifically about the influence of Ford.

“When Kieran Wilkinson was playing his first Prem Cup game, a young fly-half who by his own admission didn’t have the best of games, there were a few things that went wrong and we had all the clips lined up for him and I just said to George, ‘You might have a chat with him?’ George went and found him, organised the meeting, sat down with him, went through his clips and the feedback he got was so much more insightful than what he would have gotten from us.

“We were talking decision making and execution in our summary and George was like, ‘I saw you lose your confidence after that second kick on ten minutes, I saw your head drop’. So he talked more about the belief, the body language, the confidence that helps you drive decent decisions. That is just one example and Jonny is the same. Yeah, as good a player as they are, we are getting more out of them as individuals than what I expected."