'It was a culture shock, straight into drinking so much Guinness!'
THIS HAS BEEN a huge week in the lives of the hottest young prospects in South African rugby.
Craven Week 2024 has been taking place at the Hoërskool Monument school in Krugersdorp, bringing together the best U18 players in the country as they compete in their provincial sides, with the show concluding tomorrow.
Danie Poolman, who went on to spend five years playing on the wing for Connacht and now lives in Dublin, remembers his Craven Week well. He was born in Pretoria, not far up the road from Krugersdorp, but moved to Cape Town with his family when he was 10.
He went to high school at Paul Roos Gymnasium, famous for producing a staggering number of Springboks including current stars like Willie le Roux, Damian Willemse, and Steven Kitshoff.
Even getting selected for the Western Province provincial team was a big deal and Poolman was part of the side at Craven Week in 2007. It all started so well with wins against the Sharks and Lions but Poolman and co. were pumped 50-3 by the Free State Cheetahs in the unofficial final.
The game was live on national TV and took place in Paul Roos, making it all the more painful. The best players from Craven Week go on to play for the South Africa Schools team and though Western Province had been expected to provide a big group for that national side, only one of them made the cut.
Poolman recalls it with a rueful smile now, explaining how big a deal Craven Week is and the part it plays in the South African rugby system. Right now, rugby fans around the country are speaking with excitement about the next big prospects.
“Rugby is life for South Africans,” is how Poolman puts it. “Rugby is the international identity for the country, it’s something South Africans can always look to no matter what is going on.”
Like so many young boys in a country of 60 million people, Poolman grew up dreaming about being a Springbok. He could never have guessed that the sport would lead to him becoming an Irish citizen and marrying a Galway girl.
Poolman vaguely remembers running around his house with a South African flag when the Springboks won the World Cup on home soil in 1995, a year after apartheid had ended. His father sat in front of the TV crying.
Despite the Craven Week disappointment, Poolman advanced up through the Western Province ranks and on into the Stormers’ Super Rugby squad in 2011 when he was 22.
The Stormers had been beaten in the Super Rugby final the year before and their squad was packed with current and future Springboks. Jean de Villiers, Bryan Habana, Jaque Fourie, Schalk Burger, Duane Vermeulen, Peter Grant, Francois Louw, Gio Aplon, Juan de Jongh – the talent was remarkable.
Poolman playing for the Stormers in 2011.
“It was insane,” says Poolman of stepping up. “It was frightening in a sense because it’s your first time meeting all these players. We’d have seen them when we were on the U21s but never really spoken to them.
“Bryan Habana was my hero growing up and then all of a sudden I’m asking him for advice. It was a stacked squad.”
He did well in his first season under head coach Allister Coetzee, starting eight games, but opportunities were harder to come back in 2012 with all the back three competition.
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Poolman just wanted to play every weekend so spoke to his agent about the possibility of going overseas.
He came close on three different occasions to getting capped by the South Africa 7s side, which would have tied his eligibility to his homeland and made things more complicated down the line, but when Connacht came in with a strong three-year offer, Poolman was ready for something new and knew he could become Irish-qualified by 2015.
“It was always my dream to play for the Stormers and Springboks so I had to make peace with that but in the back of my mind was the idea I could go to Connacht, play really well and go back.
“There was also a chance you could play with the Springboks even if you were away. I even started to think about playing for Ireland because I could qualify, but it was a very tough decision to leave.”
He remembers the sweat and sense of panic as he headed for the airport that day in 2012, admitting he didn’t know a huge amount about Connacht given that their games were rarely shown on SuperSport. This was also before the explosion of rugby information on social media.
Poolman laughs as he remembers his first impression of life in Connacht. His agent collected him at Dublin Airport after a sleepless flight from South Africa and informed him that the Connacht squad would be waiting for him on the far side of the drive.
It was Galway Races weekend. After a quick pitstop at his hotel, Poolman was dropped at the Huntsman Inn on College Road.
“I’d say they had been well on it for two or three hours at this stage,” says Poolman.
“I met the manager and coaches, then just got thrown into the pit. There were lads from Galway, south Dublin, Armagh, Cork – I couldn’t understand all the different accents.
“It was a culture shock, straight into drinking so much Guinness that I was wondering what I’d done!”
Poolman in his early days with Connacht.
Poolman arrived with an injury that delayed his debut until late October but he settled in well and had a strong first season, playing on the wing and at outside centre as he scored five tries in 17 starts.
He ended up playing 71 times for Connacht in his five seasons, a number that would have been higher but for hamstring, knee, and foot injuries. It was particularly tough to be sidelined for Connacht’s incredible run-in to their 2016 Pro12 success under Pat Lam when they played a sensational brand of attacking rugby.
“We really struggled to grasp his game plan at first because it was such a change,” says Poolman.
“For a wing, there was a lot more ownership to identify space, call it in, make sure the structure was there, call the ball out the back to get it to width.
“It wasn’t just about dogging it out anymore, which we had been good at in Connacht, but actually playing a lot more.”
Poolman qualified for Ireland in 2015 thanks to three years of residency and had been told he was in the mix for the Emerging Ireland trip to that summer’s Tbilisi Cup only to injure his thumb and be ruled out.
He never got a call into the Ireland set-up but has no doubt he would have thrown himself into the challenge if he was asked to switch national allegiance.
“You can see with guys like James Lowe and Gibson-Park, how passionate they are,” says Poolman.
His time with Connacht ended in 2017 when the province opted against re-contracting him. Still only 28, Poolman was keen to play on. The Southern Kings tried to get him back to South Africa but the financial offering was poor and he turned it down.
Instead, Poolman joined Buccaneers in the All-Ireland League in order to stay fit in the event that any professional clubs needed a medical joker during the 2017/18 season.
Two games into his time with Buccs, Poolman discolated his shoulder and decided that was that for his pro rugby career.
He had married Laura in the summer of 2016, the pair having met on a night out in Galway, and they discussed a move to South Africa but opted to stay in Ireland. Poolman had yet to secure his citizenship at this stage, a strong reason not to leave.
Laura got a job in Dublin so they moved east, where Poolman soon joined a small tech company as he put the commerce degree he had studied for through the National University of Ireland to good use. The real world was a shock.
Poolman with John Muldoon after his last home game for Connacht in 2017.
“It was the mental fatigue of staring at a computer all day,” he says. “It was a massive adjustment. It’s so different to rugby. It took a good 12 months before I felt it was going OK.”
He now works remotely for an American company called Hubspot, who sell customer service software.
Poolman got his rugby fix with Malahide RFC, playing two seasons with them before a move to Blackrock and then onto Bective, where he ended up listening to his body, ended his playing days and focusing on coaching their backs this season.
He has finished up with Bective now and though Poolman will listen if any other rugby projects pop up, Laura is excited about getting her husband for full weekends for the first time since they met.
He’ll get his fix on TV in the coming weeks as the Springboks clash with Ireland. Poolman will be rooting for South Africa but he feels some grá for the men in green too, having finally got his Irish passport in 2021 after several delays due to Covid and Brexit.
“I’m Afrikaans so I speak in Afrikaans to my family, but I think in English now,” says Poolman.
“Sometimes I forget an Afrikaans word and have to replace it with an English word, when it used to be the opposite. This definitely feels like home, I’ve been here for 12 years, married, bought a house.
“I would love to go live in a different country, maybe live in Europe with better weather but as far as I’m concerned, this is home.”