Welcome back to the Salford Stadium for our penultimate game of the regular Gallagher Premiership season.

We’d love to have one more game in front of you guys, and then who knows, maybe a trip down south together too, but thinking about anything beyond this Friday makes me incredibly anxious because we know how good we’re going to have to be to beat a really good Saracens team led my old friend Mark McCall. 

Saracens know what it takes to win and keep winning at this stage of the season. Some of the players have changed since my time there but the mentality and the culture driven by the core group, the experienced lads and the coaches, who I know well, is exactly the same. Guys like Maro Itoje peak at this time of the season and are able to get more out of themselves when everyone else is knackered. 

They know better than anyone else that this is where it really matters and it would be dangerous and foolish for us to underestimate them in any capacity. That won’t happen. We’re focused on the task at hand and we know how dangerous they will be tonight. 

I spent 17 years at Saracens and it was an emotional tear to leave the people there, but it wasn’t hard for me to come home. It’s easy to put all of that to one side on nights like this because right now it doesn’t feel like I’ve ever been anywhere else. This is where I started my career, and it’s where I want to finish my career. If you cut me in half it’s all blue….maybe with a bit of orange. 

Of course Saracens are not the only team winning at the moment. We feel like we’ve hit some really good form and we’ve got our own lads who, similar to Maro, can summon up 80 minute performances when it looks like they’re running on fumes. Tom Curry is just superhuman at the moment and Luke Cowan-Dickie is playing like a man possessed. He’s settled off the field, enjoying living in the north and he’s leaving nothing to chance when it comes to making sure he’s putting the best of him out on the field. We have to manage Luke to almost save him from himself because he’d go 80 minutes every week and that’s on me, but I’m so pleased with what he’s producing. 

You have to be clever in weeks like this because we can’t just send players into games already punch-drunk from the week’s training. A lot of sports science stuff goes into it, to make sure the lads are physically and emotionally as good as they can be come the first whistle. We have more rest at the start of the week and then we give the lads what we call an MOT, where we test them to see how far they can go in training. It’s changed in the last few years and that’s a good thing because we need to look after the lads, particularly the ones who are playing international rugby too. It’s all factored in. 

It seems to be working because I was so pleased with the performance last week against Harlequins, particularly after a disappointing start where we let them get a 10-0 lead pretty quickly. There have been games this season where a bad start has led to a game getting away from us, but on Saturday, I could see from the touchline that there was a quite assuredness that the points they scored early on were points that we gave them. There was no panic and I thought ‘they’ve got this’.  

That’s a big step forwards for us and it shows that we have learned from some of our away defeats this season, particularly the game at Toulouse where I was so proud of what we put out there. Coming back into the Premiership Run-In we knew we had to find away form and what a time this is to find it. 

I’ve talked plenty about our friend the ‘super computer’ this season. I’m told it’s giving us a 71% chance of us finishing in the top four now and that shows we’re doing something right. It’s got a bit to go before it wins my affection but it is a good thing. It’s all part of our feedback loop because finishing in the top four – or even the top two – is realistic and the boys believe that. We have the opportunity to affect everyone around us and it’s in our hands. It is tangible and I want us – you included – to believe. If we’re talking about it like that, how is every other team talking about us? They should know we’re coming for them and we’re going to throw everything we have at the last part of the season to make sure it’s one we – and again I include you all in that – will remember. It gives me goosebumps just talking about winning Premierships but that’s where we are and it’s what we want to do. 

Every game is a final from here on in and we need you right there with us. Starting tonight. 

Enjoy the game, 

Al