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'It brings a lot of memories and good feelings when you drive into Belfast'
By Online Editors
Ruan Pienaar has been the main focus of attention for Belfast rugby media ahead of the Cheetahs’ Guinness PRO14 clash with Ulster.
The ex-Springboks scrum-half played for the Irish province from 2010 to 2017 before heading to French club Montpellier for two years.
He never left Belfast because he wanted to. The IRFU instead wanted home-grown players to be promoted. Now that he is back - albeit briefly - he has admitted that his wife at home in South Africa is very jealous about his trip to their former home city.
“It brings a lot of memories and good feelings when you drive into Belfast and my wife is very jealous that I am back here,” said Pienaar,’ who didn’t rule out eventually coming back to the Irish club in a coaching capacity.
“We will see what the future holds. I’m coming to the end of my playing career and our time in the next few years is in South Africa, but we’ll see.
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Andy Farrell sounds confident ahead of Ireland's clash with England
“Having spent seven years playing for Ulster it will be a strange feeling running out at the Kingspan Stadium wearing a different jersey but I’m looking forward to it,” he continued.
“It’s been a while since I have played at the Kingspan and I know how brilliant and supportive their supporters are, but it is obviously a very important game for us and we are desperate to get the result.
"We will obviously have to perform a lot better than in our last game, but training has gone well this week.”
The game Pienaar was referring to was the 36-12 defeat suffered in inclement conditions at the hands of Conference A front-runners Leinster in Dublin last Saturday.
“We had a really tough outing against Leinster in bad conditions. Some Leinster players told me afterwards they had never seen it so bad in the years that they have played there.
“In the first half, we were our own worst enemies. Leinster played well and we had no possession or field position, but we gave away too many penalties.
“You have to take the positives from it and in the second half, we were much better. I may be wrong but we only conceded one try and scored two (in the last 25 minutes), our discipline was a lot better and we kept the ball a lot better and put them under pressure more.
“Yes, a tough game if you look at the scoreboard but the way we ended was encouraging and we’ll try to take that into this game.”
WATCH: Ruan Pienaar features in the RugbyPass documentary on Fijian legend Nemani Nadolo
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Stephen Larkham, Mick Byrne, Scott Wisental, Ben Mowen, Les Kiss, Jim McKay, Rod Kafer.
There are plenty of great Australian coaches who could do a better job than Schmidt.
Go to commentsThis piece is nothing more than the result of revisionist fancy of Northern Hemisphere rugby fans. Seeing what they want to see, helped but some surprisingly good results and a desire to get excited about doing something well.
I went back through the 6N highlights and sure enough in every English win I remembered seeing these exact holes on the inside, that are supposedly the fallout out of a Felix Jones system breaking down in the hands of some replacement. Every time the commentators mentioned England being targeted up the seam/around the ruck or whatever. Each game had a try scored on the inside of the blitz, no doubt it was a theme throughout all of their games. Will Jordan specifically says that Holland had design that move to target space he saw during their home series win.
Well I'm here to tell you they were the same holes in a Felix Jones system being built as well. This woe is now sentiment has got to stop. The game is on a high, these games have been fantastic! It is Englands attack that has seen their stocks increase this year, and no doubt that is what SB told him was the teams priority. Or it's simply science, with Englands elite players having worked towards a new player welfare and management system, as part of new partnership with the ERU, that's dictating what the players can and can't put their bodies through.
The only bit of truth in this article is that Felix is not there to work on fixing his defence. England threw away another good chance of winning in the weekend when they froze all enterprise under pressure when no longer playing attacking footy for the second half. That mindset helped (or not helped if you like) of course by all this knee jerk, red brained criticism.
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