Sharks wing Steve Hanley talks crises, confidence and cunning in the latest instalment of his exclusive online column.

We're in the middle of a crisis at the moment and, to be honest, we are struggling to escape it.

It's hard to put your finger on exactly what's going wrong. Of course we've had the injuries but that's something we just have to deal with, we shouldn't be losing as many games as we are.

Personally, i just think we're lacking a bit of confidence at the moment - now we know how the bottom couple of teams in the league feel!

When you get stuck at the wrong end of the table there is so much pressure on and you get scared to make mistakes because they cost so much.

It creates cagey performances and teams are either unwilling or unable to come out of their shell.

I suppose that's one of the main arguments put forward by the people who think relegation should be scrapped. There's all this talk about the Super 14 developing the best players in the world simply because they can play without fear and aren't afraid of experimenting.

It's a convincing enough argument but I just don't buy it.

As far as I'm concerned, having ring-fenced leagues is against the spirit of competitive sport and I wouldn't swap the Premiership for any other league in the world.

But back to our performances, I think we set our standards so high last season and the fear of performing below that was always there. It's had a major knock-on effect this season.

It's really hard to explain the feeling at the club right now, but I suppose we're just in shock. We never expected to be struggling at the bottom of the table.

One of the problems has been that teams are now coming to Edgeley Park and, because we are champions, playing containment rugby. They'll just defend hard, hope to score a try and then cling on for dear life.

London Irish did it on Friday, although they got plenty of help from the referee as well.

They got a lucky try and didn't look like scoring for the rest of the game. Irish have some big brutes up front so they gave us a really tough time and it seemed that every time we got our tails up, the referee penalised us.

Then there was Sheri's 'try'. I'll be honest, I didn't think he'd scored when we were out there, mainly because none of our boys even celebrated but after the game Sheri insisted it was a try and he's not the type of person to lie about things like that.

Maybe our problem is that we don't put enough pressure on referees. I'm not talking in a Matt Dawson or Lawrence Dallaglio sense here, constantly mithering officials, but I mean celebrating when we think the ball is touched down, things like that.

You don't have to be confrontational to put pressure on the ref, the best teams have been doing it for years, and we need to learn to be more canny in that sense.

Another possible reason for our problems is that teams have 'found us out'. Last year everybody still expected Sale to play wide and run the ball so we surprised them when we dominated up front and it got us far.

This year teams have been expecting that and they formulate a gameplan to deal with that.

One of the few positives to come out of the London Irish game was that I got a bit of gametime myself, which has been a bit limited of late, and I even made a try-saving tackle!

Topsy Ojo was clean through so I just had to dive on him and luckily it prevented them from scoring.

I'm back in the starting line-up for the trip to Saracens on Sunday too, so I'm hoping I can put in a decent performance.

It's not going to be easy down there, they're possibly the form team in the league right now but we've got to go down there with nothing to lose.

From a personal viewpoint, I've never actually won at Vicarage Road, so it would be nice to end that streak. I think Sale have only won once down there and that was last year so maybe we can make it two in a row.