I sat down with Jim Mallinder and Lee Dickson to discuss the upcoming season. I first wanted to know how they were feeling about it all.
"Very excited." A simple reply from Mallinder, so I asked about preseason.
"Preseason's so been good, different preseason for us because generally the teams that are successful at the end of the season, your preseason’s short. But this season has been a little bit longer, so been a chance to recover a little bit, do some extra conditioning, and hopefully give time for some of the new players to intergrate into the squad."
With new players joining the team, I wanted to know who's impressed? Dickson replied: "Jamie Gibson, he's come in from Leicester, London Irish as well, very intelligent player, good with ball in hand. He’s a grafter as well which we like at the club. He’s impressed me and not a new player, but Jon Fisher has really impressed me as well. He had a very good preseason this year. People with niggly injuries at the end of the season have got themselves fit, got themselves excited, and in the last two games (against Saracens and Wasps) he’s been exceptional."
Has there been any stick for Gibson, coming from Leicester?
"No, hasn't been mentioned. That’s just you lot!"
Saint have a rotation policy at scrum half, which Mallinder had previously mentioned won't be affected by Dickson's captaincy. But with the arrival of JJ Hanrahan, I was curious if there would be rotation around fly half?
Mallinder said "the season's now set out so that it’s very demanding with the league and Europe, just every single week now with no weeks off. You can't win a premiership with just 15 players, you’ve got to have a squad where you’ve got strength in depth in every position and that’s something that we’re always looking to achieve and hopefully we’ve been getting stronger in that area."
Finally, the World Cup players came up.
Jim said "it's been a massive target and focus for them for the last few weeks, months, that they’ve been looking forward to. But that’s now gone, and one of the good things about professional sport is that there’s always other challenges. For them, they’ve now got to put that behind them and got to really refocus and hopefully focus on Northampton Saints and starting well."
The England and Samoa players have returned earlier and there are plans to bring them back sooner:
"We’ll be taking everybody individually. Clearly some players who have played every week and played 80 minutes, and some of our other players who have hardly played, even though they’ve been travelling with the teams. We’ll take everyone individually and see how they are physically, but more importantly mentally." This weekend will see the first examples of this, with the Pisi brothers, Fotuali'i and Kieran Brookes in the match day 23 for this weekend against Worcester.
Calum Clark came off against Wasps with what looked like a shoulder injury, but Mallinder said "he's fine. Obviously very disappointed to not make the England squad, like Luther, like Dicko. But they've put that behind them and are determained now to prove to the England selectors that they’re good enough to be in that squad."
With so much uncertainty over how the Premiership will play out, one thing is clear: this is the biggest season yet. Players will be competing harder than ever for their shirts, knowing they will have no respite until April (the European Cup quarter finals) and for two teams, the end of May. The goal is the same, the squads are bigger than ever before and with the return of the England players earlier than expected, prepare to see something amazing this year.
