The three-Test Akker Van der Merwe joined the Vodacom Bulls this season and quickly became a crowd favourite. Despite not receiving an invite to the first Springbok alignment camp van der Merwe said that he is determined to represent his country again.
“I could easily fall into a hole, and feel sorry for myself. But to me, I’d rather work harder and be at a place where there are two good hookers. For the Vodacom Bulls, it is massive to have two young hookers at the alignment camp. The future at hooker for the Bulls looks very good at the moment,” van der Merwe said.
“When something like that happens, I go back and look at all my games and see where I can improve. I won’t ever say that I’m a complete player or that I’ve mastered every single thing of my craft, so there’s always room for improvement. So it just drives me to be consistently better.”
On his impressive try-scoring form, van der Merwe said: “Half of those tries are made by the forwards so I can’t take all the credit, it’s from good mauls and I’m just the one who gets the accolades. It’s the entire pack that works so hard within the system.”
Van der Merwe laughed and said “my English airtime ran out,” when asked why he decided to return to South Africa.
“I enjoyed my rugby there but it was only rugby. We flourish as a family here more than there. And I’m not one who thinks Oumas and Oupas should only see their grandkids once a year. That isn’t good.
“That, and the weather. The kids need to play outside, get dirty and build mud cakes, for instance. I’m tired of sitting indoors helping them build Lego.”