They may have relinquished their European crown to a superb Leinster side last season, but Saracens ended the 2017-18 campaign on a triumphant note – for a number of reasons.

Besides riding through a difficult spell before Christmas to take the Premiership title, the club re-signed influential players and locked down their highly-rated coaching team until 2022.

Alex Sanderson, who oversees the forwards and defence at Allianz Park, has been a central figure in Saracens’ recent success. At last month’s Gallagher Premiership launch, he spoke about why he has opted to stay put and how his team will strive to evolve.

CM: How do you reflect on a season that featured some disappointing periods but ended with what Mark McCall called your best performance in a final?

Alex Sanderson: I think it probably was, actually. I haven’t watched it back and done the stats and everything else. But going back to your original question, speaking on behalf of the coaching staff and probably most of the players, it’s been the hardest, most demanding but most rewarding season of the last 10 years because of how we brought it around as a squad.

It’s not the coaches that stood up there and said: ‘We need to do this, this and this.’ As a team, as friends, as guys I’ve known for 10 years now, we had a lot of small, hard conversations over a length of time to get us back on the same page and the right page. That’s the rewarding thing – not the silverware, the fact that we turned it around. If we hadn’t won at the end of the season, it would have still felt the same because we were back in a good place.