THE Aviva Premiership is back now and I know Sale Sharks are desperate to get a win, as any team would be, so this will be a big training week for us.

Friday night will be a big game for me and for the club. I’m still gutted from our first two results of the season when we dropped points in the last seconds and that will stick with me all season.

We need some wins now — realistically, we have just one victory under our belt and need to start winning now. I want to be top-six by Christmas and that is massively achievable.

Obviously, I still know a lot of the guys at Sale. I was best man at Mark Cueto’s wedding this summer, I was at Toulon with Eifion Lewis-Roberts for a couple of years too, as well as the likes of Dwayne Peel and Nick MacLeod, so I have a lot of good friends up at Sale.

I spent most of my career with those guys and it is hard for them at the moment. They’ll probably turn the corner at some point, but it won’t be this Friday.

I’m sure there’ll be a bit of banter going on, but the game’s cleaned up these days — you could find yourself sitting out for three months!

I will have a fully professional attitude to the game and I just want to get this club up the league and all the lads are pulling together in the right direction.

We beat Italian side Rovigo 90-3 in the Amlin Challenge Cup on Saturday and I think the ERC need to have a look at things — there should be three tiers to European rugby.

At the end of the day, we have to win the group and we will have one eye on the game with Perpignan at Sixways in December, but we’ll switch off from the competition now.

It will come down to us and Perpignan and they struggle on their travels, so if we can stop them getting a losing bonus point at Sixways, then we can hold on for at least one at their place, then that’s us through as group winner.

Against Rovigo, it was just a case of keeping focus for the first 10 or 15 minutes because these games can end up a bit scrappy, but we went direct and did nothing fancy and the game opened up as soon as they started leaking a few tries. You have to prepare for these games and mentally you have to be up for it, or it can become a bit of a scrap.

It’s not often Craig Gillies, James Percival and I will be on the field together, but we’d have a good scrum if that happened again with a fair bit of weight going through the front row!

Percy was playing at seven and asking for a bit of direction on the pitch, but he was able to slot in and do a job.

I think Matt Kvesic was getting a bit of banter on the pitch when he went onto the left wing — the guys were enjoying seeing him out there — and it was good to see him on the end of Andy Goode’s cross-field kick.

Richard Hill has managed the guys who have put in a lot of game-time recently well and it was good to have a few days off in between the two European games.

It’s a long season and he found the opportunity to give a few of us a break while we had two easier matches, but it was back to the grind yesterday ahead of the big one on Friday night.