Elliot Daly credits Eddie Jones and pub meeting for Saracens’ return to top

Elliot Daly has revealed a meeting between Saracens’ senior players at a pub in St Albans was the start of their journey to another Gallagher Premiership final.

Mark McCall’s side are looking to become English champions for a sixth time at Twickenham on Saturday when they take on Leicester.

Leicester were the side to benefit from Sarries being relegated for repeated salary cap breaches in 2020 with an eventual 70-point deduction, which meant Tigers did not come bottom of the table and go down.

It was a tumultuous time for Saracens, who first discovered they had breached Premiership salary cap rules in November 2019 but only found out they would suffer relegation months later in January.

Daly reflected on how a meeting in the Wicked Lady pub resulted in the club’s senior players committing to staying and the journey back to the top flight in essence started there.

“It was a very weird and difficult time because there was a lot of murmuring about what will happen and how many points would be deducted,” the England international explained.

“We got deducted points and we were going to stay up so they deducted us more points which was what we had to take along the way so it wasn’t something set, it carried on pretty much for the whole season.

“We didn’t really know until we played Racing at home and that was the week we were told we were getting relegated no matter what happens.

“I think for us, I remember meeting in a pub down the road when it all started kicking off and all the senior players were there. We just came back from something, either the Autumn or the Six Nations.

“We sat in the room and we didn’t know what to say at the start because it was a very difficult situation to be able to deal with but we realised that