Aviva Premiership preview: Mark McCall not content despite Saracens' clean sweep last season

The thrill of victory did not last, and left the Premiership and European champions eager to do it all over again

McCall is hungry for more success at Saracens this season (Getty)

For any director of rugby who has never won the Premiership, or the Champions Cup, first here is the bad news if you ever manage to land one. Apparently, it is not all it is cracked up to be.

That's according to Mark McCall, the under-stated and under-rated Irishman in charge of Saracens. McCall’s side won the domestic title, beating Exeter 28-20 in the final, for the second time in a row last season to add to the European Cup they won a fortnight earlier – the whole shooting match and he is still not happy.

Anyone walking into the Saracens training ground, just outside St Albans, this week as McCall put the finishing touches to his squad ahead of the Premiership resumption this weekend would have thought they had just had a season of mid-table mediocrity.

There was the usual joshing around the squad and the staff had a football match after training but no-one was grinning as if they had achieved their life’s ambition or got their numbers up on the lottery.

At the end of May, McCall had achieved as much as a coach of an English club can achieve – Saracens also hold the Anglo-Welsh Cup which was not played last year for good measure - so you would think he had a good old celebration. And it would have lasted for weeks.

But unfortunately - for those who have not experienced it – the elation from knowing you are the best club in England and in Europe lasts about two days, then you are back down to earth with a bang.

Two days after the Premiership final Saracens England players embarked on the historic tour of Australia and even that 3-0 win has a whiff of the ‘so-what’ about it amongst some of the players now it is two months old.

The captains of this season's 12 teams line up with the trophy at Twickenham (Getty)

McCall has seen both sides of the coin. In 2014 his team lost the European Cup final to Toulon and then lost the Premiership final 24-20 to Northampton in the last minute of extra time. The hurt from that has taken much longer to subside than the high of winning a couple of pots.

“You get very little time to celebrate because the group breaks up pretty quickly – a lot of them went on tour,” says McCall: “It is amazing how the players and the staff felt the same way.

“The pain that we had two years before seems to last forever and the elation and joy you are expecting after doing what we did didn’t last too long – a couple of days.

“It was important for us to talk about and we did talk about it because it brought us back to what we do day-to-day. It is important that the experience we have with each other day –to-day is a good experience because winning trophies is great but is not the be-all and end-all.”

No-one at Saracens is asking for sympathy, and there is no-one booking therapy, and they would quite fancy winning the Premiership again to see if the comedown was a one-off.

The pain that we had two years before seems to last forever and the elation and joy you are expecting after doing what we did didn’t last too long – a couple of days.

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And from this distance there don’t seem to be many teams capable of stopping Saracens making it three from three.

They know how to win tight games and have a big enough squad that when Jamie George, Owen Farrell, the Vunipola brothers, Maro Itoje and George Kruis et al are away with England they can cope. McCall has made minimal changes to his group – Schalk Burger, the great Springbok flanker, is the most eye-catching addition and he is available all year and that is bad news for the rest of the Premiership.

If anyone can knock Sarries off their perch it could be Wasps who have made some startling signings in the summer. Danny Cipriani is back, Kurtley Beale and Willie le Roux are on their way and Kyle Eastmond has arrived in Coventry from Bath.

Add that little lot to the likes of Jimmy Gopperth, was superb at fly-half last season, the electric Elliot Daly, Frank ‘The Tank’ Halai and Christian Wade you can see Wasps will be a handful.

Gopperth shone for Wasps at fly-half last term (Getty)

Exeter and Leicester are favourites to make up the rest of the top four and Chiefs’ director of rugby Rob Baxter thinks his side did not too much wrong last time around.

“We got to our first final,” he says. “We got to our first top four and second place in the Premiership, we won a Premiership semi-final and we got to a European quarter-final for the first time. We did a lot of things that showed that a lot of what we do is pretty good.”

At the other end of the table things could be a lot closer than they are at the top. At the recent Premiership launch the coaches of the likely bottom-feeders newly-promoted Bristol, Newcastle and Worcester were all in full looking up not down mode but one of them is heading through the trap door. You can pick any one of those three to go down but there is a suspicion that Worcester might be the ones to go this year.

Carl Hogg’s team, who carelessly lost a director of rugby in the summer when Dean Ryan left, kicks off their campaign on Saturday at Twickenham. Against, yep, you guessed it – Saracens.