When the Abu Dhabi Saracens announced they were ‘coming’ a little over 12 months ago, few would have envisaged them making their Premiership debut quite so soon.
Yet after just one season as a rugby club, the fledgling outfit decided to take what chairman Steve Arnott accepts was a leap of faith and join UAE Rugby’s top flight.
Sarries begin life in the Premiership with a trip to 7he Sevens to face last season’s champions Dubai Hurricanes on Friday night, but far from treating their opening mission with a sense of trepidation there is a buzz about their Al Ghazal Golf Club training base.
Following a summer recruitment drive which has seen the club target expat forums in their hunt for players as well as snap up top-level talent in the form of Scot Dougie Steele and New Zealander Dillon Gage, playing numbers have swelled from around the 20-mark to nearly 70.
That has allowed Sarries to keep a second team in the Conference as well as moving their first team up to the Premiership, which is again testament to the hard work of Arnott and president Dave Jackson.
But as Sarries prepare to take their first steps in the top division, has the club’s growth this summer surprised its founding members?
“We hoped for it but we didn’t think it would happen in two years. Our concern was that if we didn’t go up into the Premiership, we’d attracted some good players and they may not have stayed had we stayed in the Conference,” Arnott reveals.
“We spent quite a lot of time looking at the budget, looking at the player situation that we had because it’s a transient society here over the summer months.
“I’ve been in Gulf rugby for 13 years now, there are some very good teams in the Premiership. I’ve spoken to the coaches from the first team and the second team, we’ve targeted two teams that we hope we can definitely turn over.”
Jackson and Arnott also played a large role in convincing UAE forward Peter Sampson to make the short trip across town from Abu Dhabi Harlequins.
“Go to any practice anywhere in the UAE and it will be a very rare thing to find the chairman or the president,” Sampson says, “(but) these guys are here every single night.”
Sampson also revealed Jackson came to him with a “good story” when selling Sarries and is clearly excited at the prospect of growing the club to rival his former side.
“One of things that was attractive to me was being the new kids on the block,” he adds. “When I first joined the Quins five years ago, Quins firsts played against Dragons seconds and we got a thumping. So the level of rugby in the last five years has really stepped up as they went from the Bats to the Quins.
“I felt like I contributed a lot to that, both on and off the pitch. So coming here, being part of that is really exciting for me and, I think in a couple of years, this club will be as big as Quins.”
Sampson will come face-to-face with his former team-mates on October 12, and with Sarries aiming to become a community club for Abu Dhabi natives who live ‘off-Island’ there is a feeling that having two Premiership clubs is already benefitting rugby in the capital.
“We didn’t know there were this many players, the Quins are getting 50 down to practice and we’re getting 50 down,” the hooker says. “I think if it was just the Quins a lot of these guys wouldn’t be coming out of the woodwork; because Quins have their regular 50 players they don’t do a lot of recruitment, they own all the silverware so it’s a natural draw for players to go straight to them.”
One player who definitely wasn’t drawn to the Quins was Steele, who having arrived in the UAE to work for Sarries’ sponsors IPC, was only going to turn out for one club.
“What’s exciting is that it’s a fairly brand-new club that’s going places whereas the Quins have been there and done it over the last few years, so it’s more of a challenge to bring Saracens up to that level,” he said.
FIXTURES
Friday – 7pm kick-offs
Abu Dhabi Harlequins v Jebel Ali Dragons
Dubai Hurricanes v Abu Dhabi Saracens
Dubai Exiles v Dubai Wasps
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