Strydom is back to lead Bulls’ charge for premier return

Jul 30 2009 by Andrew McGilvray, Hamilton Advertiser

HAMILTON Rugby Club are working hard at strengthening their squad as they bid to bounce back to Premier 2.

Coach Ian Morrison reckons his side will be stronger than last season, and hopes to bring in a number of new players.

Although Morrison is keeping his cards close to his chest – having lost several players at the 11th hour last summer – he confirmed that scrum-half Ron Strydom is returning to the Laigh Bent club.

Strydom comes back from New Zealand and will bring with him a Number 8.

Morrison is also on the verge of recruiting a centre from New Zealand, and players from UK clubs.

On the downside, he has lost Matt Grey and Dougie Smith to Greenock, while Allan Dodds departed at the end of last season.

Morrison said: “Things are going fine, we’ve had a good pre-season so far, everybody has been working really hard and the numbers have been good.

“We’ve recruited well, and we’ll start pulling guys in from abroad.

“Although we’ve recruited well we did that last year as well, but then some of them had visa problems, one went to Germany, and just last-minute things that meant they didn’t come to us.

“I expect us to be pretty strong by the time the season starts.

“We were strong last year, but we had a bad start, our hooker walked out, and we lost too many games.

“But there were an unbelievable number of games that we came out of, thinking ‘I can’t believe we lost that’.”

Morrison has worked steadily over the summer with his players, hoping to get a bit more out of them as they begin their assault on Premier 3.

He said: “Seven or eight of our guys simply weren’t good enough last season, but they’ve worked extremely hard over the summer with me, a couple of them have gone over to New Zealand for a while to strengthen up a bit, and hopefully they will give me more.

“Our lads have really stepped it up, and have been working with me over the summer. We had a few guys in at the end of April and personally I didn’t stop, but we officially started training on July 1.”