Ballymena sign Springbok ace ahead of AIL kick-off

South African centre Richard Aingworth arrives in the Province this week having been signed on an initial six-month contract.

After training with his new team-mates this week, the 24-year-old is likely to be included in the Ballymena panel for their opening AIL match away to University College Cork this weekend.

“We have a contact out there in Paul Flanagan, who used to play for Ballymena around the time Stevie Smith was playing,” Ballymena coach John Andrews told Times Sport.

“He lives out there and coaches around the Natal region so he’s ideally placed to identify any players who might be of use to us.

“We certainly have high hopes for Richard – he should give us a bit more ‘poke’ in the middle of the field.”

Despite Saturday’s Ulster League defeat by Dungannon – Ballymena’s first reverse of the season – Andrews has been pleased with his side’s progress as they prepare for a return to Irish club rugby’s second tier, at a time when all eyes are on the international team’s exploits in the Rugby World Cup.

Ballymena rubber-stamped their promotion from Division Two at the first attempt on the final day of last season but Andrews won’t be content simply to survive at the higher level.

“People talk about consolidating for a year but that’s a like going into a match trying to draw the game.

“I think you have to go into a league and have a crack at it.

“There is no-one in the league that you’re thinking is unbeatable so if you can get three or four wins under your belt at the start then you start to look up rather than down.

“We don’t want to be in a relagtion fight at the end of the year.

“1B is a very tough league because if you look over the past number of years, a lot of the games have been decided by two, three, four point differences.

“You can very easily find yourself on the right or wrong side - the margins between winning and losing are very small as we found to our cost in the season we were relegated.

“That’s the lessons we have to learn going back into this division and we have already been talking about the fact that we have to make ourselves hard to beat.

“Ballymena have a huge tradition of being one of the top clubs in Ulster and what we are trying to do now is reaffirm that.

“We are up there with three other clubs Ballymena, Harlequins and Dungannon so not to be in that company would have been a huge blow.

“Having played at Ballymena, I know what the club is about - the tradition of the club and the expectations that are there - you don’t walk into a job like that without knowing what the expectations are. It’s one of those where you either sink or swim,” added Andrews.

Darrell O’Kane has retained the captaincy but the skipper will miss this Saturday’s opener as he is currently on a trip to the World Cup, while there is a doubt over Paul Pritchard, who has played several of the early-season games in the unaccustomed position of wing rather than in the pack due to a long-standing shoulder injury.