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'He wants a massive pack of forwards that just wants to f*** everybody up. That's a legacy you can leave behind'

By Jamie Lyall
GettyImages-1229555510

Ask Andries Ferreira about his driving force in life, the source of his hunger and the fuel for a career that has propelled him through five nations and seven clubs, and he takes you back to the little town of Despatch on South Africa’s Eastern Cape.

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Over the past decade, the hulking lock has played as far south as Wellington and as far north as Edinburgh, where he recently signed a one-year contract. But he will never forget the roots of his toil, seeds sown by tragedy and love.

Ferreira was nine when his mother died in a car crash. His parents were separated by then. Father Kiewiet worked brutal hours on the Despatch railways for a modest purse. He gave everything he had to Ferreira and his sister, before he too passed away nine years ago. Seldom a day goes by when Ferreira does not think about Kiewiet, the influence of father on son still burns white-hot.

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Hamish Watson talks Lions, among other things…

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Hamish Watson talks Lions, among other things…

“We didn’t grow up as a fortunate family,” Ferreira tells RugbyPass. “I never got the chance to thank him for all the sacrifices he made to get me the opportunities I had. If I could change anything in the last nine years of my life, just to have had him at one of the big games, like the Super Rugby final in Johannesburg when I was playing for the Lions, that would have been amazing.”

Kiewiet’s routine was relentless, a never-ending hamster wheel of parenting, taxiing, cheerleading and grafting. Dad by day, manual labourer by night. Ferreira learned from him what it meant to be a father, what it took to put food on the table.

“He would work during the night, come home in the morning, take myself and my sister to school, go back and sleep, come back for us after school, then take me to athletics, be at rugby training and cricket training, and then drop us off at my grandparents’ and go back to work.

“We had to go on school tours and Craven Week provincial tours – he would be going all over town trying to raise money to get me to these camps. He sacrificed his sleep, his own life, not having a girlfriend or wife again, just putting all his efforts into work for myself and my sister.

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“The older I got, the more I started realising what it was like. He could have had girlfriends or gone to party with his friends after work, but he said his whole life was me and my sister and he gave everything to us. That’s the way I want to be for my two little daughters as well.”

These days, the Kruger National Park is a favourite haunt for the Ferreira clan. The four of them – Andries, wife Inette, and their toddling daughters Miane and Lea – were deep in the reserve last month when his phone buzzed. Illuminating the screen was a message appeared from Pierre Schoeman, the Edinburgh prop who was several years his junior at high school in Pretoria.

Within a few weeks, Ferreira had swapped the sun-blistered dirt of Limpopo for a fog-swathed and freezing Murrayfield bowl. Not so much giraffes on the plains as gorillas in the mist.

“I phoned Richard Cockerill and he asked if I’d be interested in coming over,” Ferreira says. “This might be, not the last chance, but with the way things are changing in world rugby, there are not as many opportunities for foreigners coming overseas as there were four or five years ago.

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“I knew Cockers from when I was a medical joker at Toulon, he is such a driven and hard-working coach as well.

“All the South African players that are also here, I played with Jaco van der Walt, Nic Groom, Mike Willemse at the Lions, WP Nel was my first roommate at the Cheetahs in 2012 and I was Pierre’s senior at school. You’ve got something that you can connect to.

“The Scottish boys are also such nice guys, it’s so easy to settle in. Pierre said there are no egos, these guys are genuinely good guys and that’s how I found it as well.

“But the accents, a lot of them I don’t understand. Especially at the line-outs, they want to make it as quick as possible, but I’m like, boys, can you please just also make sure I understand what is going on. When Andrew Davidson starts going, I’m like, what’s the guy saying?”

For now, Ferreira is alone in Scotland, grilling an array of meats in the car park of the apartment complex in which Edinburgh have found him accommodation. Where, after all, would an Afrikaaner be without his braai?

Inette, Miane and Lea, will join him in early December and with their arrival, a great burden will lift from his shoulders.

Inette had little interest in rugby when the two started dating in their late teens, but she soon became an avid and ruthless spectator. Her living-room video analysis sessions make even the most rollicking Cockerill review feel like children’s television.

“She is quite full-on; she’ll hold me accountable so badly!” Ferreira guffaws. “In South Africa, if we get home after a game and she felt I played like s**t, she’ll put the game on and tell me, ‘Ok, why did you walk here? Why did you do this?’

“I’m like, ‘I’m going to the video session on Monday and I’m going to get it all again – I don’t need it from you as well!’ But she is amazing, I must say. When we started dating, she is from Bloemfontein and she didn’t grow up in a sport-mad family, so she fell in love with it over the years.”

Beginning his senior career at the Cheetahs in 2012, Ferreira has had stints at the Lions, where he reached a Super Rugby final, and the Bulls, whom he has left for Edinburgh. In amongst that was a brief and unenjoyable spell at Zebre, an even briefer jaunt to the Hurricanes wrecked by injury, a season in Japan and an invigorating four-month joy-ride with Toulon.

It was in France where he was pitched in to a dressing room of titans, and where he first met Cockerill. Mourad Boudjellal hired the Englishman as a forwards specialist but, by the time the campaign was out, made Cockerill his third head coach of the season. The impatience and capriciousness of Boudjellal were a feature of Ferreira’s time on the Cote d’Azur.

“I phoned my wife the first day I got there and I said, ‘Listen here, I’m sitting with Ma’a Nonu, Drew Mitchell, Matt Giteau, Leigh Halfpenny, Juan Smith, Duane Vermeulen, Mathieu Bastareaud – all the stars of world rugby’,” he says.

“Then you play against Racing 92 and you’re playing against Dan Carter. That broadened my whole mindset and the way you see things, how you conduct yourself, that changed a lot as well after that four and a half months.

“The first meeting after I got there, we got into the team room, got coffee, and we saw Boudjellal coming in. They fired Diego Dominguez and they appointed Mike Ford. We had Mike Ford there for two or three months, in December Cockers came over and did the forwards coaching and the breakdowns, and just before I left to come back to South Africa, they fired Mike Ford as well and made Cockers head coach for the last six months.

“I always used to say that if you become a coach at Toulon, you’re actually not a coach, you are just a manager because you’ve got all the best players in the world, you just need to know how to manage them to get the best out of them.

Ferreira
Former Lions lock Andries Ferreira. (Photo by Gallo Images/Getty Images)

“He did an amazing job there to get the buy-in of Nonu, Bastareaud, Juan Lobbe and all those guys. He was hardcore, as he is now, but we have a much younger group than the group of mostly over-30s in Toulon. They weren’t smashing each other at training every day.”

Nothing is certain in rugby right now, not with the raging pandemic and the perilous financial state of the game.

But rather than another pit-stop on this long and meandering track, Ferreira yearns to make Edinburgh a lasting home. At 30, with a deal running until next summer, he needs to prove his worth to Cockerill and his Scottish Rugby paymasters while the big beasts are away on international duty.

“The first prize for me, I would really like to stay on here,” Ferreira says. “I’ve done the hard part now in coming over, getting to know everybody, learning new calls every day.

“And with the club being on the up, playing in play-offs last year, I would love to win something with them and help make it a really successful and feared club in Europe. That is the thinking that Cockers has.

“He wants Edinburgh to be one of the most feared teams. He wants a massive pack of forwards that just wants to f**k up everybody and I want to be part of that. That’s a legacy you can leave behind.”
Inside Ferreira, the legacy of Kiewiet remains as sharply defined as ever.

“In rugby, there is no easy patch,” he says. “There are always highs and lows, almost no in between. When life or your career gets to its lowest, you’re injured or not on the best form, I would love, love, love… couldn’t I just pick up the phone to him now? Couldn’t I find out what is going on and what he is saying? It didn’t matter if he knew a lot about rugby, it was someone you trust to speak your heart.”
From the Eastern Cape to Edinburgh, and from Pretoria to Parma, Ferreira’s nomadic voyage is fixed in devotion.

Get behind Andries Ferreira and Edinburgh Rugby with a Castle Club or Castle Club Juniors Membership.

Benefits range from priority access to match tickets at a preferential rate, access to exclusive virtual content, as well as a bespoke Edinburgh Rugby face covering.
Head to edinburghrugby.org for more information.

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Jon 34 minutes ago
Jake White: Are modern rugby players actually better?

This is the problem with conservative mindsets and phycology, and homogenous sports, everybody wants to be the same, use the i-win template. Athlete wise everyone has to have muscles and work at the gym to make themselves more likely to hold on that one tackle. Do those players even wonder if they are now more likely to be tackled by that player as a result of there “work”? Really though, too many questions, Jake. Is it better Jake? Yes, because you still have that rugby of ole that you talk about. Is it at the highest International level anymore? No, but you go to your club or checkout your representative side and still engage with that ‘beautiful game’. Could you also have a bit of that at the top if coaches encouraged there team to play and incentivized players like Damian McKenzie and Ange Capuozzo? Of course we could. Sadly Rugby doesn’t, or didn’t, really know what direction to go when professionalism came. Things like the state of northern pitches didn’t help. Over the last two or three decades I feel like I’ve been fortunate to have all that Jake wants. There was International quality Super Rugby to adore, then the next level below I could watch club mates, pulling 9 to 5s, take on the countries best in representative rugby. Rugby played with flair and not too much riding on the consequences. It was beautiful. That largely still exists today, but with the world of rugby not quite getting things right, the picture is now being painted in NZ that that level of rugby is not required in the “pathway” to Super Rugby or All Black rugby. You might wonder if NZR is right and the pathway shouldn’t include the ‘amateur’, but let me tell you, even though the NPC might be made up of people still having to pull 9-5s, we know these people still have dreams to get out of that, and aren’t likely to give them. They will be lost. That will put a real strain on the concept of whether “visceral thrill, derring-do and joyful abandon” type rugby will remain under the professional level here in NZ. I think at some point that can be eroded as well. If only wanting the best athlete’s at the top level wasn’t enough to lose that, shutting off the next group, or level, or rugby players from easy access to express and showcase themselves certainly will. That all comes back around to the same question of professionalism in rugby and whether it got things right, and rugby is better now. Maybe the answer is turning into a “no”?

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j
john 3 hours ago
Will the Crusaders' decline spark a slow death for New Zealand rugby?

But here in Australia we were told Penney was another gun kiwi coach, for the Tahs…….and yet again it turned out the kiwi coach was completely useless. Another con job on Australian rugby. As was Robbie Deans, as was Dave Rennie. Both coaches dumped from NZ and promoted to Australia as our saviour. And the Tahs lap them up knowing they are second rate and knowing that under pressure when their short comings are exposed in Australia as well, that they will fall in below the largest most powerful province and choose second rate Tah players to save their jobs. As they do and exactly as Joe Schmidt will do. Gauranteed. Schmidt was dumped by NZ too. That’s why he went overseas. That why kiwi coaches take jobs in Australia, to try and prove they are not as bad as NZ thought they were. Then when they get found out they try and ingratiate themselves to NZ again by dragging Australian teams down with ridiculous selections and game plans. NZ rugby’s biggest problem is that it can’t yet transition from MCaw Cheatism. They just don’t know how to try and win on your merits. It is still always a contest to see how much cheating you can get away with. Without a cheating genius like McCaw, they are struggling. This I think is why my wise old mate in NZ thinks Robertson will struggle. The Crusaders are the nursery of McCaw Cheatism. Sean Fitzpatrick was probably the father of it. Robertson doesn’t know anything else but other countries have worked it out.

15 Go to comments
A
Adrian 5 hours ago
Will the Crusaders' decline spark a slow death for New Zealand rugby?

Thanks Nick The loss of players to OS, injury and retirement is certainly not helping the Crusaders. Ditto the coach. IMO Penny is there to hold the fort and cop the flak until new players and a new coach come through,…and that's understood and accepted by Penny and the Crusaders hierarchy. I think though that what is happening with the Crusaders is an indicator of what is happening with the other NZ SRP teams…..and the other SRP teams for that matter. Not enough money. The money has come via the SR competition and it’s not there anymore. It's in France, Japan and England. Unless or until something is done to make SR more SELLABLE to the NZ/Australia Rugby market AND the world rugby market the $s to keep both the very best players and the next rung down won't be there. They will play away from NZ more and more. I think though that NZ will continue to produce the players and the coaches of sufficient strength for NZ to have the capacity to stay at the top. Whether they do stay at the top as an international team will depend upon whether the money flowing to SRP is somehow restored, or NZ teams play in the Japan comp, or NZ opts to pick from anywhere. As a follower of many sports I’d have to say that the organisation and promotion of Super Rugby has been for the last 20 years closest to the worst I’ve ever seen. This hasn't necessarily been caused by NZ, but it’s happened. Perhaps it can be fixed, perhaps not. The Crusaders are I think a symptom of this, not the cause

15 Go to comments
T
Trevor 7 hours ago
Will forgotten Wallabies fit the Joe Schmidt model?

Thanks Brett.. At last a positive article on the potential of Wallaby candidates, great to read. Schmidt’s record as an international rugby coach speaks for itself, I’m somewhat confident he will turn the Wallaby’s fortunes around …. on the field. It will be up to others to steady the ship off the paddock. But is there a flaw in my optimism? We have known all along that Australia has the players to be very competitive with their international rivals. We know that because everyone keeps telling us. So why the poor results? A question that requires a definitive answer before the turn around can occur. Joe Schmidt signed on for 2 years, time to encompass the Lions tour of 2025. By all accounts he puts family first and that’s fair enough, but I would wager that his 2 year contract will be extended if the next 18 months or so shows the statement “Australia has the players” proves to be correct. The new coach does not have a lot of time to meld together an outfit that will be competitive in the Rugby Championship - it will be interesting to see what happens. It will be interesting to see what happens with Giteau law, the new Wallaby coach has already verbalised that he would to prefer to select from those who play their rugby in Australia. His first test in charge is in July just over 3 months away .. not a long time. I for one wish him well .. heaven knows Australia needs some positive vibes.

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