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De Villiers ready for his new role as head of Zimbabwe’s National Team

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Former Springbok coach Peter de Villiers is ready for his new role as head coach of Zimbabwe’s National team.

De Villiers made his views clear on the current state of affairs in rugby in South Africa, saying that it’s stagnant and doesn’t look to be growing.

De Villiers’ immediate task will be to attempt to help Zimbabwe qualify for next year’s Rugby World Cup in Japan.

If successful, it would be the country’s first World Cup appearance since the 1991 tournament in England, where they lost all three group matches to Scotland, Ireland and Japan.

To secure a place in the World Cup they face stiff competition from Namibia, Kenya, Morocco, Tunisia and Uganda in the Rugby Africa Gold Cup taking place from June to August this year.

The winner will directly qualify for the World Cup, where they will face New Zealand, South Africa and Italy in pool B.

De Villiers says he is looking forward to the challenge and laughs in the face of danger.

“It’s going to be extremely difficult, what will make it a bit easier for me is that I don’t know the players, so I won’t be biased, I’ll set my standards, I’ll put out my norms that I need at international level. I’ll give them all the requirements that the position wants to compete at the highest level and if they can’t meet that then they will disqualify themselves. As I said to the boys when I went around to see them, I will never select a team again they will and what I mean by that is, if they good enough they will play if not I just have to be honest with them so it will be extremely difficult, but you know we laugh in the face of danger and we love those kinds of challenges in our life.”

In his usual manner, De Villiers is blunt about the problem facing South African rugby. He believes that SA rugby has dropped the ball by not maintaining the growth of the Springboks.

He also says that the standard of rugby in SA has fallen.

“If you look at what I had as a Springbok coach, nobody appreciated the fact that I knew what I had and as a person I knew how to work with them on how to utilise their input, if you look at the next bunch you can’t work with them the same, because you need to lead them, the other guys can lead themselves but you need to lead them to where you need them to be but you can’t lead them from down there. You need to lead them from where you left them so they can go bigger there, now everyone’s gone down and tried to bring me up, they are growing and growing and they are getting much better I’m telling you now, you can look at where Springbok rugby were in 2016 they were growing wow at 100% rate but that’s where we left them.”

His first assignment is a Rugby Africa Gold Cup match against Morocco on June 16.

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