Premiership: South Africa duo Faf de Klerk and Lood de Jager to leave Sale Sharks
Sale Sharks have announced that Springbok duo Faf de Klerk and Lood de Jager will leave the Premiership outfit at the end of the season.
Scrum-half De Klerk has played 95 times for Sale since arriving from the Lions in South Africa, while lock De Jager has 25 appearances for the club.
The World Cup-winning duo helped the Sharks to a third-placed finish in the Premiership as the club made the play-offs for the first time in 15 years.
De Klerk set to join NTT Docomo Red
De Klerk, who has enjoyed five seasons at Sale, is likely to sign for Japanese side NTT Docomo Red, while De Jager is expected to return to South Africa.
“Everyone at Sale Sharks would like to thank Faf and Lood for their huge contribution to the club over the past five years and we wish them all the very best for the future,” read a statement from Sale, who currently sit in sixth place on the domestic table.
De Klerk and De Jager will now hope to sign off their Sharks careers with silverware, with Round of 16 Champions Cup clashes with Bristol looming.
Looking ahead to the first leg, director of rugby Alex Sanderson is likely to have prop Coenie Oosthuizen back after an unfortunate sequence of events.
“There are chronic prop injuries like neck, back and all these things that senior props have to manage, but he was bitten by an insect on Thursday, believe it or not,” said Sanderson.
“It got infected and he tried to syringe it himself. Come game day he had inflammation and infection in and around the muscle because of his self-medicating approach to it. He couldn’t run.
“It’s ridiculous. The doctor’s been pulling his hair out. It’s the old school South African mentality – I’ll fix this myself.
“He’s fine now and running around like a spring chicken because the antibiotics have kicked in.”
Meanwhile, England centre Manu Tuilagi will also feature this Saturday in Salford after making his return to club duty last weekend against Saracens.
“Manu is brilliant. We’re still figuring out how best to manage him and we’re confident we can manage him through,” the Sale Sharks boss added.
“If we get him through these next few weeks then we’ll probably have a pretty good blueprint for what a training week should look like for him.
“We’ll be quite stringent on game time for him this weekend. We’ll have a real plan around that.”
