Say Hello, Wave Goodbye

By Whaley Shark
June 26 2010

After a long and unnerving period with very little visible sign of strengthening the squad, Swanny’s opened a new bottle of super-quick-drying ink and we’re signing one player a day at the moment. The Whaley Shark ponders the sound of silence.

Any player must be proud to play in a Premiership side. They have trained and practised and sweated in heat, cold and wet from an early age, and the moment they first pull on a Sale shirt is an opportunity to crystallise their hopes for the future. Some of them will make the grade, some won’t. All of them put their bodies on the line every time they go on the pitch, risking career-ending injury from one momentary mistake, or just sheer bad luck. Many of them are guaranteed health problems in later life from the battering they take.

This season, with Mike Brewer’s arrival, some of our players’ plans for the future will have been abruptly changed as he has reshaped the squad. There will have been difficult and upsetting conversations as bad news was broken to players who thought they had a secure future, at least by rugby players’ standards. We owe a debt to all of them, and we should thank them for all they did for this club. Whether they ‘performed’ in our eyes or not, they did their bit, and the bottom line is that they are only human beings, trying their best to make a go of it in a very competitive, very demanding profession, and we should not forget that in what we say about them.

If you are making difficult decisions which change others’ lives, dashing the hopes and aspirations of ten years or more, you have to handle the matter very sensitively. So if a friend or relative of mine was being moved on by the club, I wouldn’t want it splashed around. A justifiably proud professional player will want to leave with dignity and, ideally, move on to something which might give them a fresh start, either in rugby or a new career. So I understand and accept the radio silence out of Edgeley Park over the last few weeks.

That said, the silence has been well and truly broken in the last few days. Welcome to Sale, Paul, Wame, Kyle and Aston, and well done the club for making 7.20 a.m. on a work day something to look forward to!

Oh, and while the title of this article may reveal my age, it does NOT reveal a liking for early 1980s electro-pop.