Bastien Rasal

Five players in the Bayonne squad were born in 2006. Bastien Rasal, born on 12 July that year, is one of them, and the second youngest of the five.

French, 1.83m and 83kg, and listed among the backs.

Eighty-three kilos puts him in the lighter half of the back division, in the range that suits a nine, a ten or a full-back rather than midfield.

Nothing else about him is published: no article anywhere, nothing at age-grade international level under his name, nothing in the club’s own season write-ups.

The reason a page exists for him at all is that the squad list is a fact and the measurements are facts, and a player on a Top 14 roster at twenty is worth recording even when the record is thin. Yohan Orabé was a nobody in Fédérale 1 at twenty and is now a Bayonne full-back contracted to 2027, so the distance between this page and a real career is not as long as it looks.

It gets rewritten when he plays.