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A South African coach swaps Japan for top English club

By Annemie Bester
Saturday 24 May 2025

NEWS: South African rugby and scrums go together like salt and pepper, and no nation personifies that process more than the world champions.

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One will find South African scrum coaches worldwide, and one of them will be stepping into the spotlight with the announcement that Jaco Pienaar will take over the scrum duties at Northampton Saints.

Northampton Saints are bidding to become the first English club to lift the Champions Cup since 2020 this weekend.

Saints take on Bordeaux in Cardiff – the destination for their most recent final appearance, a 22-33 defeat against Leinster in 2011 – in a clash pitting two free-flowing attacking sides against each other.

Pienaar will step into the big shoes of Matt Ferguson, who has left an undeniable mark on the club’s forward pack.

Saints announced in January that Ferguson would be departing the club when his contract runs out at the end of June and have been seeking his replacement to join Phil Dowson’s coaching team later this summer.

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The club acknowledged that Ferguson’s scrum division played a key role in Saints lifting the Premiership trophy for the first time in a decade last season in the press release announcing his long goodbye.

Pienaar has spent the last three years guiding the forwards at Suntory Sungoliath in Japan’s Rugby League One.

His journey as a coach started in Potchefstroom, where he studied. He later became the coach of NWU’s Under-19s. Overall, he spent ten years, from 2005 to 2015, honing his skills as a coach in the Northwest.

During this time, he also worked with former Springbok scrumhalf Robert du Preez, who coached the Leopards from 2014 to 2015.

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Pienaar spent a year at the Tuks and the Bulls coaching their U19 teams before joining the Sharks for a four-year stint.

He moved to Japan three years ago and will now move into the next phase of his coaching career, guiding one of the top teams’ forwards in Europe

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