Former Scotland scrum-half Henry Pyrgos, who won 29 caps from 2012 to 2019, has confirmed that he is retiring from rugby.
Now 34, Pyrgos played nearly 150 times for Glasgow in an eight-year spell from 2010 before transferring to Edinburgh, where he spent five years before being released at the end of last season.
He has since taken up a job in the financial sector, but is staying involved in rugby as an assistant coach with capital club Boroughmuir.
“Time to hang up the boots,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “I always knew this day would eventually arrive. I gave it everything I had. I have loved it and I will miss it.”
Meanwhile, Duhan van der Merwe admits he could never have envisaged a rise to prominence that means he is going to his first Rugby World Cup as a talismanic figure within a Scotland backline loaded with “X factor”.
The 28-year-old South-Africa-born winger was relatively unheralded when he first joined Edinburgh in 2017 following an underwhelming year in France with Montpellier.
But his career has taken off emphatically since then. After impressing in the Scottish capital, and following three years of residency in Scotland, the swashbuckling back earned an international debut for Gregor Townsend’s team against Georgia in October 2020, who return to Murrayfield this Saturday for a pre-World Cup warm-up match.
Van der Merwe – who had a stint at Worcester before returning to Edinburgh almost a year ago – was part of the 2021 British and Irish Lions squad, is seventh on Scotland’s all-time try-scoring list, and is cast as one of the most exciting wings on the planet as he heads to his first World Cup in France at the start of next month.
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