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'There was a mob of supporters waiting to beat Chris Ashton up'
By Liam Heagney
Sale boss Alex Sanderson has this week recalled the trouble Chris Ashton encountered on his 2014 visit to Belfast with Saracens to try and get his Sharks up for this Saturday night’s must-win Heineken Champions Cup encounter with Ulster. Both the Gallagher Premiership and URC clubs currently sit outside the qualification cut-off point in Pool B, ninth place Sale on five points with Ulster placed tenth with three points.
That situation has set up a winner-takes-all situation at Kingspan Stadium and Sanderson, the former long-serving Saracens assistant, has been telling his Sale players about what took place nine years ago when playing away in Ireland with a Premiership club.
At the time, Ulster were one of European rugby’s heavyweight teams as they had contested the 2012 final versus Leinster and having been defeated by Saracens back at Twickenham in a 2013 quarter-final, the Irish province was determined to make home advantage count in its 2014 last-eight rematch with the Londoners.
With Ulster’s Jared Payne red-carded just four minutes into the tie, Saracens went on to narrowly win 17-15 and the poorly received celebrations of the two-try Ashton were remembered this week by Sanderson when preparing his Sale team for the huge challenge that lies ahead.
“It is still a really worthwhile and brilliant competition for the exposure that it gives these lads on a bigger stage,” said Sanderson when asked by RugbyPass to sum up the pulse-racing confrontation that awaits Sale in round four of the revamped Champions Cup.
“There is no substitute for that experience, having to go to a really partisan crowd like Ravenhill. I’ve been trying to describe it to the lads this week. I went there in a quarter-final with Saracens and there was a mob of supporters waiting for Chris Ashton to beat him up - and we should have let them have him. He swan-dived twice, he should have just scored the tries humbly. We looked after him, we snuck him out.
“But you don’t get there, do you, you don’t get that kind of partisan crowd so much in the Premiership. Maybe a little bit at Gloucester. So all these kind of experiences makes them grow as people, makes them grow as players, so it is still really exciting for me even though it [the Premiership’s financial situation] makes my job a little more difficult. We know what is coming, it’s going to be a fair old ding-dong.”
Heading into the final round of the pool stages, four Premiership clubs (Sale, London Irish, Northampton and Gloucester) occupy elimination places outside the qualification cutoff for the round of 16. That is more than the Top 14’s three strugglers (Lyon, Bordeaux and Castres) and just one URC club (Ulster).
Each of the three leagues provided eight teams in the 24-strong tournament and the current playoff picture left Sanderson ruminating about the current trouble with the sustainability of professional club rugby in England. “We don’t get the support from the union, the government agencies or whatever it might be that the French get… and we need to have multiple streams of revenues to have this (salary) cap to come back up again.
“Let’s not beat around the bush, there is a world recession going on. My brother (fellow ex-England international Pat) works in the banking industry so the people directly affected by this are philanthropist owners, so they are getting the squeeze as well so I understand it from their point of view.
“That is what is affecting the finance. Your eyes aren’t open to it if you think everything is rosy. You have to do what you can to make the best out of what is a difficult situation right now and a lot of the Premiership clubs are kind of buying into that.”
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Latest Comments
Yeah I actually think it was Havili that took it off him. Not bad himself, but on the advice of Razor, who didn't even pursue it and use Havili on a split bench as 10 cover?
One huge cluster#$@% but I think you could be right, I liked O'Connor when he won at the Reds and I've just got a funny feeling he's going to dominate Super Rugby, kinda like how Cooper came back to the Wallabies as an experienced head and spat out South Africa. I think James could do the same with the Blues and other Aus sides. I'd really love Rivez to get a lot of minutes though.
Go to commentsI rated Lowe well enough to be an AB. Remember we were picking the likes of George Bridge above such players so theres no disputing a lot of bad decisions have been made by those last two coaches. Does a team like the ABs need a finicky winger who you have to adapt and change a lot of your style with to get benefit from? No, not really. But he still would have been a basic improvement on players like even Savea at the tail of his career, Bridge, and could even have converted into the answer of replacing Beauden at the back. Instead we persisted with NMS, Naholo, Havili, Reece, all players we would have cared even less about losing and all because Rieko had Lowe's number 11 jersey nailed down.
He was of course only 23 when he decided to leave, it was back in the beggining of the period they had started retaining players (from 2018 onwards I think, they came out saying theyre going to be more aggressive at some point). So he might, all of them, only just missed out.
The main point that Ed made is that situations like Lowe's, Aki's, JGP's, aren't going to happen in future. That's a bit of a "NZ" only problem, because those players need to reach such a high standard to be chosen by the All Blacks, were as a country like Ireland wants them a lot earlier like that. This is basically the 'ready in 3 years' concept Ireland relied on, versus the '5 years and they've left' concept' were that player is now ready to be chosen by the All Blacks (given a contract to play Super, ala SBW, and hopefully Manu).
The 'mercenary' thing that will take longer to expire, and which I was referring to, is the grandparents rule. The new kids coming through now aren't going to have as many gp born overseas, so the amount of players that can leave with a prospect of International rugby offer are going to drop dramatically at some point. All these kiwi fellas playing for a PI, is going to stop sadly.
The new era problem that will replace those old concerns is now French and Japanese clubs (doing the same as NRL teams have done for decades by) picking kids out of school. The problem here is not so much a national identity one, than it is a farm system where 9 in 10 players are left with nothing. A stunted education and no support in a foreign country (well they'll get kicked out of those countries were they don't in Australia).
It's the same sort of situation were NZ would be the big guy, but there weren't many downsides with it. The only one I can think was brought up but a poster on this site, I can't recall who it was, but he seemed to know a lot of kids coming from the Islands weren't really given the capability to fly back home during school xms holidays etc. That is probably something that should be fixed by the union. Otherwise getting someone like Fakatava over here for his last year of school definitely results in NZ being able to pick the cherries off the top but it also allows that player to develop and be able to represent Tonga and under age and possibly even later in his career. Where as a kid being taken from NZ is arguably going to be worse off in every respect other than perhaps money. Not going to develop as a person, not going to develop as a player as much, so I have a lotof sympathy for NZs case that I don't include them in that group but I certainly see where you're coming from and it encourages other countries to think they can do the same while not realising they're making a much worse experience/situation.
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