Ruck and Maul: So it's true, Diamond is returning to give the Sharks a cutting edge

An email landed on Ruck and Maul's desk before Christmas, subject: "Diamond for Sale Urgent." It was a few hours after the departure of the Sharks' head coach Mike Brewer, so was this a message flagging up a return for Steve Diamond, currently with Russia, to the club he once hooked for and coached? Nope, just a silly piece of spam allegedly flogging jewels from the Congo. But what's this? Last Thursday it was announced that Diamond, who has also been scouting for Northampton while maintaining an office in Manchester, had been appointed as Sale's new executive director of sport. Life imitating spam – whatever next?

Sale's big sell-out at Reebok

Sale's ticket sales for the Premiership match against London Irish at Bolton's Reebok Stadium have passed 12,000, guaranteeing the club a record home attendance three months before the 16 April kick-off. The previous best was the 10,641 whenever Edgeley Park has been full (not once this season).

Premier Rugby chief executive Mark McCafferty appears to concur with the Sale chief executive, Mick Hogan, who called in these pages a fortnight ago for England to hit the road and whip up interest in the north. McCafferty has suggested relocating the end-of-season fixture between England and the Barbarians.

Bracken's sequined sequel

Kyran Bracken was glad-handing with the best of them at last week's Rugby Writers' Club dinner. The ex-England scrum-half, as Ruck and Maul was reminded in connection with the Sale article, was another of northern rugby's successful sons to relocate south to win international caps with Bristol and Saracens.

Brought up in Liverpool, he attended Stonyhurst School, as did Will Greenwood (Harlequins and Leicester) and Iain Balshaw (Bath, Gloucester and Biarritz). Bracken now owns three portable ice rinks, bringing skate shows to the masses, inspired by his success in Dancing on Ice.

Ruck and Maul invited a young Saxons flanker to the dinner and when talk turned to great games, including the 1990 Scotland-England Grand Slam decider, when David Sole walked his Scots on to the Murrayfield pitch, the openside asked: "Who's David Sole?" How the rest of us felt out of touch.

Battle of the head-bangers

Life after rugby exercises many a player's thoughts. The recent Saxons recruit Joe Marler 'razed' more than an eyebrow when he played for Harlequins at Twickenham three weeks ago with the words "Jolly Hog Sausage" shaved on his scalp, either side of his customary Mohican.

It was an advertisement for his club-mate Ollie Kohn's mobile catering company. But Kohn hardly repaid the compliment when a clash of heads between the pair left the loosehead prop Marler needing to cover up a wound – and the advert – with a scrum-cap.

But perhaps it came in handy when it came to mollifying Quins' director of rugby Conor O'Shea, from whom Marler kept his comic cut hidden by a beanie hat during the Twickenham warm-up.

hughgodwin@yahoo.co.uk