Sale's Sanderson reveals 'extremely stressful' battle to retain Curry twins and key stars

Sale Sharks director of rugby Alex Sanderson has lifted the lid on one of the most demanding stretches of his tenure, revealing that securing new signings and retaining existing stars ran almost concurrently — and that the retention battle proved the harder of the two tasks.

Having brought in Joe Marchant, Nicky Smith, Tomas Francis, Alex Lozowski, Ponepati Loganimasi, Elia Canakaivata, Christ Tshiunza, Courtney Lawes and Xavier Roe ahead of the current campaign, Sanderson says the club immediately pivoted to contract talks with players already on the books.

The Curry twins, Ben and Tom, along with loosehead prop Bevan Rodd and hooker Luke Cowan-Dickie are among the high-profile names whose deals expire at the end of the season. Tshiunza and Lawes, who each signed one-year contracts on arrival, add further urgency to the situation.

“After the signing of all our new recruits, the next job was to retain all our existing core group,” Sanderson said. “So we’ve been plugging away since the Six Nations on that front, and it’s all moving very positively, but it was extremely stressful.”

Sanderson explained that players become free to speak to rival clubs from the start of July, meaning the window between finalising incomings and opening retention talks was effectively non-existent.

“In the Six Nations, I’ve been feeling like you’ve completed one task and then you’ve just got to go, ‘right, now these guys come onto the open market in July’,” he said. “That was the stressful bit, having to convince them, to a degree, but to remind them that this is the best place for them in terms of their development, because they’re obviously very career-minded.”

Despite the pressure, Sanderson struck a cautiously optimistic note, describing progress as “very positive” while acknowledging the emotional weight of leveraging personal relationships built over years at the club.

“It’s not the best part of the job, it’s a bit of a hamster wheel,” he added. “I found it stressful having those conversations because of the relationships I’ve built with them. Do I have to lean into that again? But it’s part and parcel of the job.”