36-year-old Van der Linde retired from professional rugby after the 2015\/16 season with French Top 14 side Montpellier, but remained in the setup as scrum coach. Van der Linde, who made 75 appearances for the Boks and was an integral part of the team which won the 2007 World Cup, will now replace Hein Kriek at the Steval Pumas.<\/p>\n
Kriek has been given an early release to take up an opportunity to join the coaching staff of the Czech National Rugby Union under Director of Rugby Phil Pretorius.<\/p>\n
Van der Linde said that he is happy to be back in the country to join a quality coaching staff.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is great to be back in my own country and to work with quality people at the Pumas. I\u2019m looking forward to the opportunity,\u201d said Van der Linde.<\/p>\n
He added that he is excited to work with head coach Brent Janse van Rensburg again, whom he played under and coached with at the Eastern Province Kings.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was very impressed with Brent\u2019s way of coaching and managing the programme at the Kings. It\u2019s exciting to be able to work with him again,\u201d Van der Linde said.<\/p>\n
Janse van Rensburg said that Van der Linde brings a wealth of international experience with him.<\/p>\n
\u201cBeing an ex-Springbok who won the 2007 World Cup, and more recently coaching at Montpellier, CJ brings us a wealth of experience. Having coached with him before, I know what huge value he can add. He is very sound both technically and in character. We warmly welcome him to the Steval Pumas family,\u201d said Janse van Rensburg.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In a momentous move for the Steval Pumas, world-cup winning Springbok prop and highly regarded coach CJ van der Linde has signed as forwards coach for the 2017 Currie Cup season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2844,"featured_media":69784,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"hasGravity":false,"cxt_article_byline":"Tobie van den Bergh","cxt_disable_google_ads":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2887,7,11,2,2886],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general-sport","category-local-news","category-local-sports","category-news-headlines","category-sports-news"],"category_labels":{"Category":"News","SubCategory":"Local news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2844"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69781"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69781\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}