It was almost the perfect opening weekend for Jean Kleyn.
Gloucester won their first game of the PREM season, thumping Exeter 45-24 in a surprise win for a team that languished in eighth place last season away to a title contender. South Africa second row Kleyn led a tub-thumping singalong with his fellow debutants in the away dressing room.
And his latest shipment of belongings also landed at his new home in Cheltenham.
‘My meat dehydrator arrived in a box from Ireland,’ Kleyn tells Daily Mail Sport. ‘Now I just need to find a good local butcher so I can get some silverside to make my first round of biltong!’
And he was able to enjoy it all with a full head of hair after Gloucester scrapped their infamous barbershop initiation for the new arrivals.
For Kleyn, the only downside was he spent Sunday morning watching Australia end the unbeaten run of his beloved Springboks. ‘It was going pretty well until then!’ explains the 2023 World Cup winner.
New Gloucester giant lock Jean Kleyn celebrates a winning start to life in the West Country
On the pitch at Sandy Park with his Irish wife, Aisling, and their two young children after an impressive win over Exeter
‘I don’t think anyone’s going to shy away from the fact South Africa could have been better. You can say whatever you want about Australia receiving four yellow cards towards the end but at the end of the day, it should have been in our hands.
‘You can’t win every game. I’d like to think we’ll be good enough to get past most teams, but inevitably we’ll slip up once or twice, as we saw on Sunday.’
Sitting in a portacabin outside Kingsholm, it is easy to forget that Kleyn was part of Rassie Erasmus’s bomb squad that helped the Springboks win the 2023 World Cup. The 6ft 8in 33-year-old towers over everyone around him and his mandate is to bring that winning mentality to Gloucester, who have also brought in Wales co-captains Dewi Lake and Jac Morgan this summer to bolster a pack that lost its genius scrum-half, Tomos Williams, to Saracens.
‘Putting the team in front of yourself is Rassie’s biggest thing,’ Kleyn explains. ‘South Africa has got a really muddled history. Lots of good and lots of bad. I’m not a politician but us all working together to raise the nation is more important than one of us getting ahead. If someone is told they’re not playing, there’s no player that says, “that’s a load of bullshit”. No one is bigger than the team.
‘I’d say there’s a similar mindset at Gloucester to South Africa. Hard workers. There’s been a big change here at the club over the summer. We have new players, a new defence coach, a new forwards coach, a new scrum coach. I didn’t feel like I was being dropped into a system that was already so established that you can’t affect it. I felt like I could help with things and implement things I’ve learned over the years.
‘I spent 10 years at Munster before I came here. We weren’t always the most skilful or the most talented but we’d always outwork the opposition. That’s something that (head coach) George Skivington talks about here.
‘But to caveat that, we’ve got amazing talents in our backs and forwards so if we can combine that, then we’re flying.’
At more than two metres tall and weighing in at 19st 4lb, Kleyn is the archetypal South African lock. His size and physicality has stood out from the very beginning, when he was spotted playing student rugby back in 2012. It has taken him on one of rugby’s most storied journeys – including five Ireland caps in 2019, before switching to the land of his birth in 2023 – and now he is ready for a three-year chapter in the West Country.
Kleyn (back centre) believes Gloucester have ‘a similar mindset to South Africa – hard workers’
The 6ft 8in second-rower played five times for Ireland in 2019 but switched his allegiance to the nation of his birth four years later
Kleyn won the 2023 World Cup with South Africa and is hoping to return to Rassie Erasmus’ squad in time for the Springboks’ push for a three-peat next year
‘I went to Stellenbosch University in 2012 to study engineering. I wanted to be an engineer all my life and I played university rugby for s***s and giggles,’ Kleyn says. ‘I got into the Under 19s with Western Province and John Dobson pulled me into the Under 21s after three games. I was like, “I don’t know what I’m doing here, mate”.
‘One thing led to another and here we are. I didn’t come into the professional game with a great skillset. But intent, willingness and aggression, those are things I had in spades. I just leaned into that and it’s pretty much what I’ve built my career on.
‘I love to scrum. I love to maul. I love to tackle. I pretty much fall into that cookie cutter. The physical parts of the game interest me more than your showy stuff on the edges. I do what’s written on the box and that expectation suits me down to the ground.’
The engineering has been sidelined for now. Kleyn renovated an old property in Ireland but here in England he has settled for a pre-furnished rental house. ‘There was always a project before. I was building a braai area or putting in a new kitchen. I’m taking a break from that for a few years now. We’ve rented a fully furnished place here so if something breaks, then it’s someone else’s problem!’
Kleyn has moved over the Irish Sea with his Irish wife, Aisling, and their two young children. The grandparents are only a short flight away in Galway.
There were opportunities for Kleyn to move to the Japanese top flight, where the rugby demands are lower and salaries potentially more lucrative, but Kingsholm presented a more satisfying challenge.
Kleyn is ready for the week-to-week grind of English rugby and, with a World Cup on the horizon, he has every intention to force his way back into Erasmus’s plans for the hunt for a three-peat. South Africa face Italy in Turin, France in Paris and Kleyn’s old friends Ireland in Dublin to close out the inaugural Nations Championship next month.
‘Mate, 2023 will probably go down as the year of my life,’ he says. ‘My first child was born in February, Munster won the United Rugby Championship at the end of May and the next morning I got a call from Rassie, bringing me into the South Africa squad.
Kleyn spent a decade with Munster before joining Gloucester this summer, winning the United Rugby Championship in 2023 with the Irish province
And five months later, Kleyn (pictured right with Eben Etzebeth, RG Snyman and Franco Mostert) was lifting the William Webb Ellis Trophy with South Africa
‘For me, it’s about the next four weeks just putting as big a shift as I can for Gloucester and hopefully the Springbok coaches see that and think I’m worthy of the jersey again’
‘For the trophy homecoming, we were doing this open-top bus tour through a township in Cape Town. It was rough. Shacks everywhere. At one stage we were driving next to this strip of grass and there were 1,000 kids all just sprinting along the grass. It was like a movie.
‘I think back to it and I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. People with no hope all of a sudden found a little bit of it. The best thing you can give to someone is a bit of hope.
‘I’d like to think I would have been involved in the June series but I popped my bicep tendon at the end of April. It took me 16 weeks to get back from a 12-week injury which put the summer series in the rearview mirror. It’s a shame because I was really looking forward to potentially pulling the jersey on if I had the opportunity.
‘For me, to be honest, it’s about the next four weeks just putting as big a shift as I can for Gloucester and hopefully the Springbok coaches see that and think I’m worthy of the jersey again.’
