Beware Sale banana skin, Glaws

Having shown that they are at last capable of beating te best, a potential banana skin awaits Gloucester as they play their third Kingshom game on the trot at the weekend, this time against the worst.

The Premiership is back, and the current table shows that Sale Sharks are the worst team so far this season.

So as Glaws prepare for their noon kick-off, they need to beware of making the sort of mistake many other teams have made in the past by taking their opponents lightly.

Sale are stranded at the foot of the table, but they are showing signs of arresting the slide – they got their first Premiership win at the start of the month when they beat London Irish, but then lost narrowly away to Irish in the LV= Cup before beating Saracens in the same competition at their new home in Salford last weekend.

Their awful start to the season has seen a lot of behind-the-scenes changes, but ex-Glaws coach Bryan Redpath is still there – his latest job is head coach, we think, but it might have changed again while we weren’t looking.

Either way, Nigel Davies will no doubt be telling his players they need to treat Sale juist as seriously as they would treat any other team.

Having suffered a blow already this week with the news that James Simpson-Daniel will be out until the late stages of the season following shoulder surgery, Glaws don’t want more bad news.

But there was some news to counter that on JSD … Sione Kalamafoni is fit again after being out for three weeks with an ankle injury, and the big man is keen to resume where he left off.

He told the Citizen: “I think there's a good feeling in the team, a real brotherhood.

"You always try to give your best for each other, and that's great.

"That has come naturally for us, with how the coaches are involved, and how they mould us in certain things. Hopefully that will keep on going and bring more good results and rewards to us.

"We have a lot of power in our pack now, with Ben Morgan, Akapusi Qera, Tom Savage and Will James among plenty of others too.

"We don't rely on just one or two to do that job, we've got threats all over the place, and that's always going to keep defences busy."

And Nigel Davies is asking the club’s pacemen to do the same in the absence of JSD.

Jonny May, the fastest of them all, is still injured, but Davies said: "Now it falls to the next guys to come in and fight hard to make the same kind of impact that Sinbad has for us so far this season.

"We've played without James on a couple of occasions and we've been able to do that, and I've every confidence in the guys who will be stepping up.

"It's been frustrating for Jonny, because we've expected to have had him back earlier.

"But we're just looking at a slightly different direction in terms of his rehab now, I don't want to put any pressure on him but he shouldn't be that far away really."

The Sale game might look easy on paper, but on the pitch it just might not be.