The former Namibia, Lancashire, Moseley & Fylde scrum-half
Ever since I was a kid growing up in Namibia, my biggest dream wasn’t to play for the Springboks (I was once involved in the South Africa U21s set-up) but to play at Twickenham.
That might seem strange but it all stemmed from watching the Springboks in their first match against England in England, post-Apartheid. I was so taken in by the crowd, the size of the new stand that was being built and the grass and the lushness of it. Where I am from, in Walvis Bay, all you can see are sand dunes and the sea, no greenery. I watched the video of that match time and time again, and that only reinforced my desire to go and play rugby in England.
I’d already left Namibia as an 18-year-old, to go and play rugby, after my parents took me to Bloemfontein. I ended up playing for the Cheetahs as a 20-year-old. Rassie Erasmus gave me my senior debut! From there, I went to Durban but as it was a big Union, there were five or six players in my position and I never made the breakthrough with the Natal Sharks After that, I went to the Pumas.
It was in 2007 that I came to England, on a working holiday visa. For the first three to four months, I played for Letchworth and for Hertfordshire – my first taste of the County Championship, a competition that I have very fond memories of as it was through playing for Lancashire that I got to fulfil my dream of stepping out at Twickenham, not once but six times with them and another time with Sale Sharks in the Middlesex 7s.
I got to know Chris Chudleigh, who was connected to Sale, and he got me up to the North West and I played on Monday nights in the Premiership A League for them whilst playing for West Park on a weekend. From there, I got an opportunity to play for Lancashire, in the final against Gloucestershire in 2009.
Now that we’re talking about it again, I am getting goosebumps. After all those years of wondering what it would be like, would it be like I imagine, suddenly I was there, pulling up in our coach outside the gates. It was a curtain-raiser for England v The Barbarians and it was so surreal. I had played in all the big stadiums in South Africa and in front of big crowds but this was something else. We had an opportunity to walk out onto the pitch before kick-off and I went to the centre of the pitch, picked up some grass, smelt it and put it in my pocket as a memento.
With one goal achieved, my next ambition was to play professional rugby in England. I did really well in an A League game against Leeds, and Kingsley Jones, the Sale coach at the time, called me up into the first-team squad with a view to me being on the bench for a Premiership game against Bath.
Unfortunately, the club couldn’t register me because of the status of my visa, not in the required time anyway, and my chance had gone. So I applied for indefinite leave having just got married to Simone, who’s not only my wife and the mother of our three kids but my business partner as well. De La Sports was set up in 2019 while we were living in the Isle of Man through my role as coach of Vagabonds.
“I picked up some grass, smelt it and put it in my pocket as a memento”
Unfortunately, applying for indefinite leave takes quite a while so, to keep myself active and fit in case a club came calling, every day I used to run three miles around the park opposite my mother-in-law’s house in Preston, and then Simone and I would do passing drills against this big wall and wouldn’t stop until she was happy I was hitting the targets (graffiti markings kids had spray painted on it!). Talk about far removed from Twickenham!
I am sure most players who have been involved will say the same about what it is like pulling a Lancashire jersey over your head, it is special. Nellie (Mark Nelson) and the staff always made sure we well looked after, we’d stay in nice hotels and travelled on luxury coaches. As games came towards the end of the season, we only trained once a week, on the Wednesday before the match on a Saturday and they always made the sessions fun. Everyone bought into their philosophy of heads up rugby. So when Nellie offered me another chance to play at the end of that otherwise inactive season, I jumped at it. Also, it enabled me to get back in the shop window.
Moseley asked me down for a trial and I signed for them. I wasn’t aware that the club captain was Gareth Taylor, the scrum-half, so at first it was a case of being patient and training as hard as I could for when the opportunity to play came.
Finally, I got my chance, against London Welsh away, four or five weeks into the 2010/11 Championship season. In the warm-up, Gareth’s back wasn’t right and Smithy (Ian Smith) told me I was needed to start. I knew I was ready and I felt so free on the day. I ended up running riot, and the guys fed off me and I scored the last try, and we won, having not won there as a club in donkey’s years. From then on, I never looked back. My perseverance had paid off.
The same was true with Namibia. Some people at the Union had it in their minds that I didn’t want to play for the Welwitschias because once, when I was 18/19, I chose to play for my club at the time instead of in a friendly against Morocco. The whole thing was poorly handled.
It wasn’t until my brothers, Darryl and Sergio were picked by Namibia and used their influence, together with help from others, that the path was cleared for me to be considered again.
In November 2010, I was selected for a European tour to Majorca, for friendlies against Portugal and Spain, but once again red tape got in the way and I wasn’t allowed to travel because of a passport issue. Thankfully, I didn’t have to wait long for my Test debut, that came a few months later against Romania in Bucharest at the IRB Nations Cup.
With the 2011 World Cup on the horizon, I was faced with a dilemma. I was in talks with a Premiership club but there wouldn’t be a deal if I went to the World Cup.
It was a painstaking decision and whilst getting to experience the World Cup was amazing, you sometimes cannot help but think ‘what might have been’. From a rugby point of view, it was tough. We had some heavy defeats and personally I didn’t get the game time I’d hoped for. However, I did come off the bench against South Africa and played against Ruan Pienaar, who’d been in the team when I made my debut for the Cheetahs.
After the World Cup, Moseley had left the door open for me to come back. But Smithy had gone and with the change of coach and a load of new faces that I didn’t recognise, I almost felt like the new boy who had to prove himself all over again. It was a frustrating second season and although Moseley offered me a new deal, Simone and I, who was pregnant with our first child, decided to go north to be nearer family. Nellie got wind of this and got me down to Fylde. Those final few seasons under him and Brian Ashton were brilliant, the best I ever had.
On my debut, against Sale Sharks, I put in a really good box kick but all I could hear was Nellie shouting, ‘No, no, no”. He said, ‘We don’t do that here’. So I had to really strip my game back from being structured to just running with it. It is how I grew up playing with the Cheetahs so it was great to be back playing my natural game.
Their brand of fierce and confrontational rugby really resonated with me and the things I learnt from them helped to shape me in my early years coaching at Myerscough College and Lancaster University. I also experienced that Barbarian spirit as a player, having been selected by them in 2014. Wearing the famous black and white hoops was a very proud moment for me.
Now, after well over 10 years in England, I am back in Namibia. I have just been appointed as the National U20s and academy head coach. There are 28 rugby clubs and just under 10,000 registered players here. It is not a lot and we definitely need more rugby players to feed into the system and come out the other end. We need a pathway to do that and that’s something I am busy working on.
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