Last season’s losing Premiership semi-finalists lock horns on Friday night with both sides still trying to rediscover their spark. Bristol are 12th in the table, Sale just three places higher, and while Harlequins demonstrated last term that the play-offs should not yet be counted out for either team, the new year cannot bring about a change in fortunes quickly enough. Granted, Sale won their last match – against injury-hit Wasps – but consistency has been a chronic problem for a side who have not been able to string two wins together, having been widely tipped to continue their upward trajectory in Alex Sanderson’s first full season in charge. Bristol, meanwhile, got off to a bad start, initially suggesting that last term’s semi-final defeat by Harlequins was not entirely out of the system. Increasingly, however, they have looked a busted flush, even if scorelines have improved in narrow defeats by Leicester and Exeter in recent weeks. The reasons for each side’s decline are myriad and Bath’s plight demonstrates just how hard it is to get out of a Premiership rut at the moment. To name a few, Bristol seem to have been hit harder than most by the effects of a reduced salary cap while Sale have struggled to cope without their influential scrum-half Faf de Klerk, and each side has been hit by Covid disruption, either domestically or in Europe. Listen to Sanderson and his opposite number, Pat Lam, this week and they insist they are still enjoying the challenge, even if they sound a little weary, but both articulate the hurdles to overcome in different ways. Lam is determined to stick to the process, to focus on performance in the confidence that results will come. Sanderson, meanwhile, is candid over the adjustments from wearing a coach’s hat to that of a director of rugby’s. “I’m enjoying it, I’m really am,” says Lam. “This is the challenge, this is what coaching is about. It’s about walking to the pressure, about embracing it. If you don’t, you shouldn’t be in this job, you shouldn’t be involved in any sort of coaching if you’re only looking for wins and successes. At the end of the day, when you’re dealing with team sport, you’re taking everyone through the journey. Keeping everyone aligned and on target and not being pulled down by things you can’t control.” Having been edged out by Exeter and Leicester, another physical contest is expected at Ashton Gate as Sanderson marks almost a year in the job at Sale. AJ MacGinty lines up for the Sharks against the side he will join next season but neutrals will be denied a scrum-half head-to-head between two England hopefuls in Sale’s Raffi Quirke and Bristol’s Harry Randall as the former is injured. “There have been some brilliant highs and some reality checks over the past year,” says Sanderson. “The biggest lesson is that it’s not all about rugby, I wish it was but there is so much on the exterior that goes into the role and the happy running of a club. It’s challenging, it makes you grow as an individual, you take all these things and make the most out of them and try to make sure they don’t take away from the performance of the team at the weekend. It’s a bit of a minefield at times. “We all have an ideal of what the environment and the culture and the on-field action for the players should be. That’s a pure part of the game but the reality of salaries, caps, Covid and its ripple effect, the up-management of investors as well, it is a distraction at times away from the pure art of coaching and trying to build a team. There are a lot of facets to running the club, it’s not just about the rugby. But I am enjoying it, it’s not like it’s‘woe is me,’ I wanted this, but I didn’t realise how much time and energy those other things would take up.”