As befits a campaign that has gone badly astray, injuries have played a key part.<\/p>\n
Sale’s England core have nearly all spent significant stretches on the treatment table and been unavailable for selection. <\/p>\n
Back-row twins Tom and Ben Curry, winger Tom Roebuck, Asher Opoku-Fjordjour, and in recent weeks, fellow front-rowers Bevan Rodd and Luke Cowan-Dickie, have all missed large chunks of action.<\/p>\n
The coaching front has also been affected. Marco Bortolami left his job as head coach in December after just six months at the club, while defence coach Byron McGuigan started a job share with England in October before leaving Sale in March.<\/p>\n
Sanderson said he had been tested in a way he had not experienced before, but with the support of owner Simon Orange, he had real conviction that things would turn around.<\/p>\n
“In the tough times, the adversity, you get to see who stands up in terms of leaders,” Sanderson said.<\/p>\n
“Young lads have to step up, which they did, and you realise who’s in your corner and for what reasons.<\/p>\n
“For all of those things, I’m really grateful, for learning the lessons the hard way and I’m very positive about the future.”<\/p>\n
Sale have strengthened their squad for next season by signing England internationals Courtney Lawes, Joe Marchant and Alex Lozowski, along with Wales front-row pair Nicky Smith and Tomas Francis, to add experience and ease the pressure on the club’s promising homegrown players. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As befits a campaign that has gone badly astray, injuries have played a key part. Sale’s England core…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":470048,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[111,139,69,213],"class_list":["post-470047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=470047"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470047\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/470048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=470047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=470047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=470047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}