As excited as Wade Graham is about Luke Lewis’ signing at Cronulla next season, the stand-in skipper doesn’t want his friend’s imminent arrival to overshadow this year’s run at the NRL premiership.

The Penrith junior says the Sharks need to take advantage of their hot start to the year which gave the club’s diehard fans belief their 55-year premiership drought could be over.

The Sharks are clinging to fifth spot on the ladder, but have dropped three points in their past two games and will be desperate to turn things around against Canberra at Toyota Stadium on Sunday.

“We’ve done all the hard work early in the year so now we need to put a couple of wins together now and push for that top four spot,” Graham, who is slotting in at lock and taking over the captaincy as Paul Gallen recovers from a knee injury, told AAP.

“Everyone in the comp knows how important it is to finish in the top four, so we’d like to just put a win on the board this weekend and hopefully build from that and string a couple together.

“… The last two weeks haven’t been our best – we haven’t played bad footy but we haven’t been playing at the level we should be coming into this time of the year.”

Lewis’ recruitment from Penrith, on a four-year deal starting next season, is expected to strengthen Cronulla’s title hopes even further – but Graham has urged his teammates to not to let it disrupt their finals charge.

“It’s very exciting news having Luke over next year but by no means are we just putting our case forward for next year,” Graham said.

“We’ve worked hard this year and we’re not sitting in fifth position for no reason.

“It’s going to be very exciting to get Luke over, but next year is next year.

“We definitely want to give it a real shake-up and finish the back end of this year strongly and hopefully go as deep as we can go.”