Sale Sharks' Tommy Taylor and Tom Roebuck compete in chess. Photo: Paul Cooper for the Telegraph.
In addition to the main training ground of the Sale Sharks, Carrington is home to a small, unassuming building that played a key role in the club's qualifying standings. Premier League Playoffs.
This is Sale's Mind Gym. It is rather shabby and also serves as a martial arts dojo, but offers a haven of calm amidst the constant turmoil of a full training ground. Going back to his days at the Saracens, Alex Sanderson was a voracious student of sports psychology and subsequently a firm believer in the power of meditation
Since his appointment as Rugby Director of Sale in 2021, Sanderson quickly realized two things. First, that the South African in the second row will have to work hard to convince him that five minutes alone with his thoughts is as useful as a dozen deadlifts. Secondly, even a Buddhist monk will find it difficult to do breathing exercises in the room above the gym, where Dr Dre is playing from a boom box at full volume.
So he approached CEO Sid Sutton and urged him to build a building designed to provide «space for the cognitive process and mental tools.» It was equally important to call it a gym. «We had to rebrand for a number of people who were more resilient than I expected for anything intangible,» Sanderson told Telegraph Sport. «If you call it a gym, you can measure that increase in strength.»
A chess culture has also developed in Sale under the leadership of Manu Tuilagi, and although this is happening outside of the gym for the mind. , this reinforces the feeling that this is not 'normal' rugby club.
However, the building was less than half the equation. Finding the right person to manage the process was crucial. Almost every elite sports team has some sort of team psychologist, but in Sanderson's opinion, they always «sit on the sidelines of what the rugby department does, so for the most part they're not as well integrated.»
Sanderson wanted their performance coach to work inside the team bubble, so it had to be someone the players could instantly connect with. «We wanted to find someone who played the game, failed and succeeded at it, had high ability and an interest in the psychological element of the game.»
After walking around the houses, it turned out that the ideal candidate was right in front of Sanderson. Rugby league coach Jamie Langley worked with Sanderson as a defensive consultant, but their connection ran much deeper. “I was on the phone with him for hours and my wife told me, ‘You’re missing the obvious person, you can’t stop talking about him.’
Langley was named maximum performance coach. As a player, Langley made over 250 appearances for the Bradford Bulls and won five caps for England. He enjoyed the game's contact element, but was equally intrigued by human psychology. “What drives both the person and the player,” Langley said. «This is a person who has to dedicate himself to the process to become the player you need to go out and complete the plan for the weekend.»
Langley, who went on to take over as defensive manager when Wales poached Mike Forshaw this year, says he has no big secrets about it. He dabbled in neurolinguistic programming and binding to certain mantras, and also disappeared around the many rabbit holes around the breath.
“Basically, this is how we can control our nervous system, our fight-or-flight response to our breathing and bringing ourselves into parasympathetic tone during games, when necessary, which is very, very difficult.”
There was a long burn-in process as the squad was taught the basics of breathing exercises and mindfulness. It's now an automatic process that happens during every practice when Langley starts the metronome timer to get the team to synchronize their breaths.
«Think about when you first learn a golf swing, you have to break it down into different components, and everything seems impossible, but over time, with the acquisition of skills, it becomes natural, and then becomes autonomous. You want to get to the point where the guys don't even know they're doing it.»
However, as Sanderson says, faith can only get you so far. Players need to see tangible results. This is provided in the form of momentum plots that generally track clusters of good and bad results in a match. “If we have a negative result in the game, the question is how quickly we can properly respond to it, return it to a positive result and gain momentum,” Langley said.
Taylor and Roebuck at Sale's «mind gym» Credit: Telegraph/Paul Cooper
“We look at our momentum charts and whenever we pay a lot of attention to it, we very rarely slip more than a couple of results before we can beat it. Whereas we have found in the past that when we had a couple of bad results it snowballed. We may need 10-15 minutes to recover, or a natural break, such as a break, to just readjust and adapt.”
Both Sanderson and Langley say Sale is an «emotionally intense» team that has both strength and weakness. Just as important as improving the momentum charts was the progress of individuals. Langley highlights defender Joe Carpenter, who has gone from 'happy, lucky' to 'very focused, very deliberate', and England winger Ben Curry, who is now 'very, very good at controlling his mind'.
Some of this will still come with experience, but Langley's goal is to speed up this process. «You talk to someone like Manu [Tuilagi], for example, he's very self-aware and quite spiritual at 31,» Langley said. “But for the first 10 years of his career, he felt like he could have been a better guy, but there was no one around to help or guide him along the way. And he had to figure it out himself, and as we say, if we can help guys at 25 become as self-aware as Manu at 31, without having to go through that experience and have all those scars, then that's a win.»< /p>
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